


I think I'm gonna start a fire

by claudinedelyon



Series: Ignite [1]
Category: SKAM (Italy)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Developing Relationship, Gratuitous references to Bambi, Happy Ending, Inspired by Firewatch (Video Game), Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Set in the US for plot and convenience reasons, Summer Romance, Talking through a radio, Wildfires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27955766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claudinedelyon/pseuds/claudinedelyon
Summary: Martino needs a break from his life and especially from the consequences of his own poor decisions.So, when he finds an ad for a summer job thousands of kilometers from everything that went wrong, he takes it.Which is how he ends up spending three months in the middle of nowhere with the sole company of the forest, a skittish deer, and Nico, the elusive voice at the other end of the radio.
Relationships: Niccolò Fares/Martino Rametta
Series: Ignite [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2079102
Comments: 14
Kudos: 29





	1. Arrival

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, this fic is not even remotely seasonally appropriate, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
> 
> Title from Passenger's "Start a Fire".

Gathering every ounce of energy he has left, Martino drags his feet over the last step and stumbles forward, catching himself on the cabin door. The handle yields easily when he presses down on it and he pushes the door open, takes two steps in and lets the door click shut behind him.

He’s made it. He’s gotten on a plane, then another one, he’s ridden a bus, carpooled with a very chatty ranger and hiked for 8 hours and now he’s here, in the middle of nowhere, thousands and thousands of kilometers from everything he knows.

The backpack suddenly feels like lead on his shoulders, so he shrugs it off and lets it drop to the floor. For a second, he remains still as exhaustion flows through his every limb and his ragged breaths are the only sound piercing the wide, oppressive silence that has fallen on the cabin.

There is a switch on the wall to his right that is marked “Power” and is just close enough to reach. He switches it on.

He rubs his eyes with a deep breath, and the first thing they fall on when he opens them again is the bed, appearing clearly in the now-lit cabin. It’s small and bare and the most appealing thing in the world to him in that instant.

Behind him, a crackle breaks the silence and startles him.

“Two Forks Tower, this is Thorofare,” a voice announces in slightly accented English.

Slowly turning around towards the sound, Martino takes in the bookshelves sitting on a narrow cabinet and the minimalist kitchen until the only thing left, standing right by the door, is a small desk across the room.

“Two Forks? I see you’ve got the light on, can you pick up?”

There’s a radio on the desk with a blinking red light. Martino automatically picks it up and hesitates for a second before pressing the button to speak. His English’s never been that good and he’s not sure how he’s going to manage a conversation with a stranger after the three days he’s just had, not to mention the last five months or even, hell, the last two years.

“I know it’s late, but it won’t take long, I swear,” the voice continues, as if it could read his thoughts. With a feeling that the voice is not going to let up until it receives an answer, Martino pushes down the red button on the side of the radio.

“Hello?”

“Finally!” The voice exclaims. “I was starting to wonder if a lynx got your tongue.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Nico, I’m the one who sent you all the info. You’re Martino, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, how was your trip?”

The voice is friendly, but Martino’s entire body is screaming for sleep, and now that he’s here, the thoughts he had managed to keep at bay throughout his journey are rushing in again, reminding him that he might have just made the biggest in a long line of mistakes.

“Listen, Nico, I just hiked all day and I’ve come a long way. Can’t this wait?”

“Sure, I mostly wanted to make sure you got here in one piece. The rest can probably wait until tomorrow.”

Relief washes over him and he rests his hand on the desk to steady himself as his legs threaten to give out.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Just radio me whenever you’re up. It’s quite a hike to get here, so you’ll get to take it easy for your first day. Have a good night.”

“Thanks, you too,” Martino manages through a yawn.

“Oh, and Martino?” The voices pipes up again just as he’s about to put down the radio.

“Yeah?”

“Welcome to the Shoshone.”


	2. Day 1

The first thing Martino notices when he wakes up is the birdsong. In the space of those first few minutes as he takes in his surroundings, he probably hears more species of birds than he’s encountered in his entire life. The sun is already up in the sky and thirst and hunger both manifest themselves as soon as he’s awake enough for some self-awareness.

Another thing that he immediately becomes aware of is how much his body hurts. Even carefully unfolding his legs to put his feet down on the floor causes pain to flare through his thighs and his shins down to his very toes, or so it feels like. His neck feels stiff and his shoulders are throbbing. A flurry of movement to his left catches his attention and a bird that must have been sitting on the railing surrounding the cabin flies away. Martino’s eyes follow the bird for a moment before falling on the forest around him. There are trees everywhere. Trees and mountains as far as the eye can see and he’s in the middle of it, alone in his old wooden tower.

With a wince, he manages to stand up and walk the few steps separating him from where his backpack still lays right where he had dropped it after fishing out a pair of shorts, a tee-shirt and a washcloth to clean himself up summarily before falling into bed. He doesn’t remember his head hitting the pillow so he must have been out like a light despite the thin mattress and the stiff bed under it. At least, it had probably spared him having to spiral into wondering whether the decision to come here was really as dumb as everybody around him had made it out to be.

In the only cabinet in the room, he finds instant coffee and some obviously well-worn kitchenware. Accepting that a shitty source of caffeine is better than no caffeine at all in his current state, he then sets out to find the box of bland cookies he had bought at a gas station during his endless bus ride two days ago. Once the water has boiled, he brings his underwhelming breakfast to the desk and settles there, with nothing but the greens and browns of the park and the pale blue of the sky as his view.

Next to the chipped coffee mug, the sight of the old-fashioned radio brings back vague words about contacting his supervisor when he was up. He grabs the radio and presses the only button on it.

“Hello?” He tries uncertainly.

A second later, the radio crackles.

“Good morning, Two Forks.”

“Morning. Is this Nico?”

“It is,” the voice answers with what sounds like a smile. “Did you sleep well, Martino?”

“Like a log.”

Laughter sounds through the receptor. “I’m not surprised. It’s a pretty long hike to get here.”

“Yeah, and I’m not really a big hiker,” Martino confesses, feeling what is probably a blister on the sole of his feet.

“Oh, by the end of the summer, I’m pretty sure you will be,” Nico replies. There is a pause before he switches, to Martino’s complete surprise, from his near-perfect English to native Italian. “You’re a long way from home.”

“How did you know?” Martino can’t hide the surprise in his tone as he gladly switches back to Italian as well. The middle of nowhere, Wyoming, was not at the top of his list of places where he expected to find someone from home.

“Hm, I don’t know, _Martino Rametta,_ how could I have figured it out?” Martino smiles despite himself. He may have taken the job specifically to escape Rome and the trouble that seemed to be brewing at every street corner there, but with a few familiar words and the teasing in the voice of a complete stranger, he already feels a little less lost and a little less alone. “I’ve read everybody’s files. Plus, I’d recognize that accent anywhere. I don’t hear it much around these parts,” Nico continues.

“Why didn’t you say anything last night?”

“You didn’t sound like you were quite up for a conversation.”

“Right.” His memories of arriving in the cabin may be fuzzy but he does remember how unbearable the weight of having to make conversation had felt. “Sorry, I was really tired.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve had worse welcomes, trust me. I told you, it’s a long hike, and some people have to go even further into the park. Usually, everything’s better after a good night’s sleep.”

“That’s good.”

Martino holds the radio, his thumb on the button, but with no idea what else to say. He could just say goodbye, get to settling in his tower, and maybe start reading the massive, bright orange binder that is sitting at the other end of the desk, but he realizes that he is loath to put an end to the conversation. The past week had been filled with hurried preparations for his trip and the journey itself had been long and lonely, and it feels like ages since he’s been able to talk to someone without feeling any pressure to take sides or justify himself. Before he has settled on anything, Nico beats him to it, although the apparent non-sequitur gives Martino pause for a second.

“So, who’s the girl?”

“What?”

“Or the boy? Or person?”

“What does that mean?” The topic immediately puts Martino on edge, so his answer comes out a little sharp, which doesn’t seem to deter Nico.

“90% of people who come here and don’t have any special interest in the forest are running away from something, and in my experience, it’s usually someone. And for anybody to come from as far as you have… there’s gotta be someone.”

“Okay. What are the other 10%, then?”

“Screwed-up people looking for some kind of answers,” Nico replies without missing a beat.

And damn if that doesn’t hit a little too close to home.

Although it seems obvious now that he can’t have been the only one who took the job as a means to escape from his life, Martino is not ready to admit to any of it out loud. So, secure in the knowledge that there’s nothing Nico can do from wherever he is if he just stops replying, Martino does what he’s become an expert in, he deflects.

“Are these official percentages?”

“It’s from the very serious study I perform myself by bugging all the new lookouts.”

Through the radio, Nico’s voice retains his enthusiasm and curiosity as if Martino’s reluctance was not palpable through the admittedly poor connection. As he goes through everything that led him to scroll through cheap flights to the United States at 3am on a very early Tuesday morning, Martino wonders if some of it might have been avoidable if his attention had been taken by actual boy troubles. If, for instance, he could have bothered to do more than disinterestedly let guys Filippo introduced him to flirt with him while allowing old feelings that he knew could never lead anywhere and that he was supposed to be over fester.

He shakes off the thought immediately and gives what might be the truth or a half-truth, he’s not even sure himself.

“There’s no… there isn’t anyone. I’m probably in the 10%.”

For the first time, that seems to leave Nico speechless. He’s still here, the crackling of the connection between the two radios can still be heard, but he’s quiet. This quiet doesn’t feel right, so Martino pushes through. “Are you a screw-up, too?”

The crackling stops this time and Martino curses himself for his big mouth. But then, Nico laughs.

“No, for me, it was definitely girl troubles.”

Even if he knows very well what Nico means by the phrase, it brings a flash of the hurt in Eva’s eyes that would later turn to anger, of Eleonora’s defensive stance, the disbelief on Sana’s face and the complete lack of that same disbelief on Emma’s. But girl troubles are only one part of the web that he chose to untangle by fleeing the country for three months.

A sudden beeping sound provides a welcome distraction and Martino glances around to find the source of the noise. It isn’t until Nico apologizes that he realizes that it’s been coming through the radio.

“Sorry, hold on, I have to take this.”

The next few seconds are quiet in a way Martino’s not used to. It’s not perfectly silent because he can hear the rustle of the leaves all around him, the chirping of the birds, the very slight hum of the generator just outside the door, the creaking of the wood and his own breathing that he becomes suddenly highly aware of. But it’s a peaceful background noise, there are no cars honking, no strange banging coming from upstairs, nobody arguing in the street and no kids screaming on their way home from the nearby school.

“Martino?” The quiet is shattered and Martino grabs the radio again. “I have to talk to another lookout, so I’m going to give you the short version for now. On your first day, all you have to do is get familiar with the lookout, your equipment, check out the map and the main trails around. Do you see that massive orange binder?” Martino’s eyes fall on the binder again, absolutely impossible to miss given its size and color. He nods without thinking, and Nico continues as if he had been able to see him. “It’s got everything you need to know, guidelines, emergency procedures, some maintenance stuff. You can start familiarizing yourself with it, that might take a while. Do you have any questions for now?”

Desperately wracking his brain for something as he glances down at the frankly terrifying table of contents, Martino has to admit defeat.

“Not right now, no.”

“If there’s anything, you can always call me on here.”

“OK. Thanks, Nico.”

“I’ll talk to you later. Have a good first day, Martino.”

Martino loses track of time. After spending most of the day reading the mind-numbingly boring binder, his brain decides to refuse to absorb any more information. So, since the sun is still high enough in the sky that evening is not about to fall, he decides to take Nico’s advice and start familiarizing himself with the main trails that lead up to his tower.

He takes the bare minimum with him, his water bottle, the map that he had found underneath the binder and his phone purely out of habit. Since he’s arrived in the park, it hasn’t been showing any bars and his attempts at connecting to the Internet haven't been more successful, not offering any 3G, not even a 1 or 2G. At least, it lets him know that he’s been walking for almost two hours when he realizes that he probably has just enough energy to make his way back.

Luckily, he hasn’t ventured that far on the last trail that heads north from his lookout, so he should be back before sunset and before he runs the risk of waking up even more sore than he already is. He’s also run out of water and as the weather is already hot for early June, he’s parched and sweaty and missing the shade of the cabin. He is trying to coax a few more drops of water out of the bottle when a rustle and a movement in a bush at the edge of the trail makes him look down and stop dead in his track.

Martino’s gaze meets a pair of brown eyes looking right back at him wearily from a few steps ahead of him. His limited knowledge of the wildlife can only tell Martino that the animal must be some kind of deer. He guesses by the length of his antlers and a vague memory of a documentary he must have seen as a kid that the animal is a young male, but it’s all the information he can gather about his sudden visitor.

The deer’s nostrils flare but apart from that, he doesn’t move. Torn between how much he had been looking forward to kicking off his heavy hiking shoes and not wanting to frighten him away, Martino attempts a slow, careful step forward. His foot hasn’t even touched the ground that the deer turns around and vanishes in the undergrowth.


	3. Day 2

Once Martino is up, dressed and with some food in his stomach, he takes a look around the tower and puts his hands on his hips as he contemplates the firefinder standing in the middle of the room with its detailed map of the area. Now what?

For a start, he puts away _Birds of Wyoming_ which he had started leafing through while having breakfast after a curious bird had landed on his windowsill to stare at him curiously. The bookshelves at the end of the bed contain a dozen books, mostly novels from writers he’s vaguely familiar with, a couple of fire safety manuals which were all published in the previous millennium and the one copy of a guide to local birds. Somehow, the latter had won over all the overs.

Once the book is back on its shelf, Martino doesn’t have any more clue as to what he’s supposed to be doing exactly, so he opens the door and steps outside on the walkway running around the tower that gives him a 360-degree view of his surroundings. In the blur of setting up, figuring out how everything worked, where everything was, he hasn’t taken the time yet to really consider the landscape he’s going to be staring at for most of the next three months, or his sector, as the giant binder called it.

At the thought, he remembers Nico’s words from the day before, telling him to call if he had any questions. Since he’s not sure how to proceed, he walks back into the room and picks up the radio from its charging station.

“Hello?”

There is no reply for several seconds, so Martino keeps the small radio pressed in his hand and walks out again, taking a seat at the top of the stairs and letting his eyes drift over the mountains in the distance.

The telltale crackling that’s already become familiar is the only warning he has before Nico speaks.

“Good morning, Martino.”

“Good morning.”

“How was your first day?”

“Good. I did what you said, read the manual, went for a walk. I met a deer.”

“On your first day, lucky you. There are a lot around here, but they’re usually pretty shy. They tend to stay away from lookouts.”

Given that he had been back to his tower in under fifteen minutes after his encounter, the news is surprising to Martino.

“Really? That one was not that far from my tower. But he did run away pretty quickly.”

“Maybe you’ve made a friend, then,” Nico offers, a smile evident in his voice.

Martino huffs a brief laugh at the idea that the animal who had vanished as soon as he made the slightest movement could be considered a friend. He pointedly does not think about his own skittishness around his actual friends in the last few months. It takes a few seconds of silence for him to realize that he’s not sure anymore why he had picked up the radio. There must have been some intent behind it, but mostly, after two days of Nico greeting him and delivering instructions, it had seemed like the thing to do.

“Did you need something else?” Nico inquires after a short pause, sounding more amused than annoyed.

“Sort of. I was wondering… What do I do?”

“What do you do?”

“For the job, what happens now? I’m not sure where to begin.”

“Oh.” Understanding dawns in Nico’s voice. “From now on, it’s kind of automatic pilot for you until the end of summer. You can finish the manual…”

“I read it yesterday.”

There is another pause which makes Martino wonder how reading the instructions he had been told to read could possibly have been a mistake.

“You read the whole thing?” When he speaks again, Nico sounds surprised and possibly almost impressed.

“Yes.”

“That’s… Nobody reads the whole thing in just one day. It keeps some people busy for their whole first week.”

“Oh. I didn’t really have anything else to do.”

“No, that’s good. But it’s just so boring. How did you even manage it?”

Glancing towards the thick binder, Martino agrees privately that it’s not the most fascinating piece of literature he’s ever had to read, but he had at least appreciated immersing himself into a whole new field of knowledge, especially if all that was required of him while he was still jet-lagged and recuperating from his endless journeying, was reading. He had only started to mind when the words had begun to blur together, making his head throb.

“Clearly you’ve never sat through a whole lecture on Adam Smith,” he shoots back and feels oddly gratified when laughter comes through the radio in response.

“That’s true, I haven’t.”

“Lucky you,” Martino offers, repeating Nico’s earlier words.

There’s something about Nico, about the way he’s been taking everything in stride, Martino’s bad mood and his reluctance to answer basic questions, or the way he seems so casually interested in whatever he has to say, that puts Martino immediately at ease despite the distance, the weight of the journey clinging to him or his determination to not think about everything he left back home.

“Now that you got the most boring part out of the way, you look out for fires.”

“Okay, but what does that entail exactly?”

“It’s pretty straightforward. You have to precisely measure atmospheric pressure every 6 hours and log it in, along with diurnal temperature cycles, because any variations could be important. Keep your IR detector with you at all times and do a reading every 4 hours. We’ve got satellite imaging under control, so you don’t have to worry about that. But if you’ve got a lidar, that’s good, too.”

Martino’s pretty sure his head is spinning and he has to check that he is in fact sitting down because it feels like he might be falling. He’s not entirely sure he’s breathing either.

“But I don’t have any of that,” he replies shortly, gripping the radio tightly like a lifeline.

“You mean you didn’t bring your own equipment?”

Of course, it was too good to be true and there must have been some kind of mistake during his application process because Martino cannot even run away from his problems without creating more for himself. His throat tightens at the idea that he might have to make the exact same endless journey back and admit to everyone that he was wrong, that he failed. The anxious knot in his throat which had started to come loose tightens again, making his next words come out snappish.

“Nobody told me to. And the ad specifically said no experience was needed, I don’t know how to do any of that.”

There’s silence over the line. As Martino’s own words ring out in his ears, he realizes that he’s right, that he had read the ad so many times to convince himself he was making the right decision that he can clearly picture the phrase “No experience needed” written in a bold font at the bottom of the page. Suspicion arises in his mind when the silence stretches out. “Wait, are you screwing with me?”

“Yes, sorry.” Nico’s tone is half-sheepish, half-held back laughter and any trace of worry vanishes into thin air as Martino lets out a long breath.

“Fucking hell, why?” In addition to not having to suffer through more jet lag in such a short space of time, the thought at the forefront of his mind is utter relief that he doesn’t have to go home. Avoiding unnecessary travelling apparently comes second to salvaging whatever’s left of his dignity.

“First day hazing, Marti, it’s an ancient tradition, it’s got to be followed.”

“You freaked me out for a second,” he admits, resting his right elbow on his knee to smooth out the lines on his brow.

“You weren’t looking forward to going back home, uh?” Nico comments, his voice a little too knowing for Martino’s comfort. “I told you most people were running from something.”

“Maybe I just didn’t want to have to pay for a new plane ticket,” Martino counters.

“Maybe.” Despite effectively conceding his point, Nico doesn’t sound like he really believes him and Martino can’t even blame him for it. But as they have now circled back to the reasons for his presence here, he changes the subject.

“Seriously, though, what do I do, then?”

“You just look, Marti. Look out for anything out of the ordinary, any sign of smoke, any change in the light, wildlife fleeing, a smell, anything, then you radio me and I’ll get the word out. Even if you’re not completely sure, you can tell me and I’ll get someone to check it out.”

“Okay. So, I can’t move from this tower for three months?”

As much as he is not what one would call an outdoorsman, the prospect of being surrounded by nature, in what had seemed like the opposite of his usual Roman environment, had been a big draw of the job, so the idea that he might have to content himself with staring at it from above without losing himself to the forest below is, unexpectedly, a disappointment.

“Oh, no, you can. As long as you still pay attention wherever you go and you make sure to give your surroundings a good inspection a couple of times a day when you’re at your lookout. We might actually need you to check out some things every once in a while if we don’t have anybody else around. Sounds good?”

At the question, Martino lets out a snort.

“I think even I can manage that.”

“I have complete faith in you,” Nico replies in what sounds like a perfectly serious tone. “It’s all up to you now. I’ll talk to you later.”

Somehow, he manages to make the trivial phrase sound like a promise and Martino tries to hold back a smile.

“Thanks, Nico. Talk to you later.”


	4. Day 3

When Nico had mentioned that he might need him to “check some things out” at one point, Martino hadn’t been sure what he meant but hadn’t wanted to ask. As it turns out, he gets an answer on his third day.

After spending most of the day staring at the map in the middle of the room to identify landmarks on the horizon so he can place any potential signs of fire accurately, Martino is startled out of his focus by an agitated Nico who asks him to look through his west-facing window. Martino, who had been trying to place a peak in the north, turns around and leans against the sink to scan the landscape.

“Can you see it?” Nico presses after a few seconds of silence. 

“I can’t see anything right…” He trails off as a burst of colorful sparks explodes in the air, closely followed by another one. “Are those fireworks?”

“That’s what I thought. Someone’s playing with fireworks in a forest right in the middle of wildfire season.”

“But there are signs everywhere.”

“You’ll figure out pretty soon, Marti, that some people don’t give a shit about signs. Unfortunately, that means we have to give twice as many shits for them.”

Compared to their previous conversations, Nico sounds uncharacteristically exasperated at the situation. Given that fireworks had been listed pretty high on the binder’s list of fire hazards that warranted a pretty steep fine and that these seem to come from the middle of the wood lining the clearing where Two Forks tower stands, Martino can’t begrudge him his reaction. He’s only been here for three days and the sight of more fireworks shooting up into the sky is pissing him off, so he can’t imagine how Nico, who has probably been working here for years, must be feeling.

“What can we do about this? Is there someone who can make them stop?”

“Yes, you.”

“Me?” Martino turns away from the window to look back at the map. No matter how much he wants the fucking fireworks to stop, he feels wildly unqualified for the task. “But I’m not a ranger or anything.”

“From what I can tell from here, they should be somewhere in the vicinity of Jonesy Lake, that means you’re the closest. There’s nobody else around or I wouldn’t ask.”

“But what if they don’t listen to me?”

“You’re from fire safety, that carries some weight,” Nico replies patiently. “You can always mention those fines, they tend to be pretty dissuasive. And if they won’t listen, call me, I’ll send in the rangers.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best.”

“Thanks, Marti.” The palpable relief in his tone gives Martino a renewed sense of purpose. He picks up the pack that is sitting by his door, filled with essentials and ready to go, as recommended by his binder. As he makes his way down the stairs, Nico’s voice comes through again.

“If you take the trail that heads west, the one that passes left of your outhouse, you’ll get to Jonesy Lake in about half an hour. It shouldn’t be too hard to find them once you’re there.”

Grateful for the indication as he hasn’t had a chance to find his bearings, Martino sets off on the path more confidently than he feels. “Thanks, I haven’t gone that far yet.”

“I’ll bet you’ll be familiar with it pretty soon. It’s a really nice place to have a swim or watch a sunset.”

“That’s good to know,” Martino replies, filing away the recommendation for when the summer progresses and the sun turns more and more unforgiving. As he passes the outhouse that stands at a fork in the path and has been the only negative in the whole experience so far, Martino picks up the radio again. “Hey, speaking of the outhouse…”

Through the radio, Nico laughs, a full laugh free of the edge that had previously been in his voice.

“Don’t even hope, it doesn’t get any better than this, no matter how long you’ve been working here. It’s the outhouse or the woods.”

“I guess I’ll have to live with it.”

“We all do, Marti. You’ll survive. Call me when you get there.”

As soon as he gets to the edge of the forest, Jonesy Lake is clearly marked by a sign, which makes Martino hope the rest of the process will be just as smooth-sailing. The trail leads him into another, smaller clearing at the bottom of an escarpment. The source of the fireworks becomes apparent as soon as Martino’s eyes fall on five guys who seem to be about his age and who look pretty much drunk off their asses, possibly high, too.

One of them is holding a camera and filming two of his friends who are making Martino’s job very easy by brandishing a bunch of fireworks and shouting excitedly in what could be German as easily as it could be Dutch for all he knows. Martino can only hope that whatever’s about to happen is not going to end up on YouTube.

The tallest of the three guys notices him and yells something in his direction before correcting himself and switching to English. They look the very opposite of threatening and when Martino informs them that they can’t light fireworks because they might cause a fire, instead of the opposition he was expecting, he receives only blank stares. They seem so stunned by the news that he can’t tell if they are just that drunk or if they genuinely weren’t aware that fireworks could represent a risk for the forest.

While they start arguing between the three of them about who should take the blame for having the idea in the first place, Martino chances a glance at the other two guys who are still sitting in the background and have remained quiet the whole time, only to find them so wrapped up in each other that they don’t even seem to have noticed they had a visitor. Or they don’t until one of them suddenly turns a piercing look in his direction for a brief instant before returning to the boy in his arms. Martino swallows any envy he might feel and turns his attention back to the film crew.

They’ve put down the fireworks as well as the camera and they look a bit deflated. The cameraman picks up a beer from a massive pack they must have struggled to bring all the way here, and he offers it to Martino. His friends immediately seem ecstatic at the idea and all three join forces to try and convince him to stick around and have a drink with them. Martino glances between them, at the backpacks strewn around a few steps behind and the two guys in the background who are now looking at him with curiosity. They all seem fun and friendly, but the situation feels oddly wrong.

The whole setup is vividly reminiscent of similar evenings spent by the lake at Gio’s cabin just the previous summer, usually around a bonfire that didn’t threaten to burn anything down. Over the memories of these nights, another image appears of the guys rendered speechless by confusion after he had announced out of the blue that he was leaving the country for three months. All he wants is to make a quick getaway and not be reminded of everything he left in Rome.

So, it’s exactly what he does, he begs off the drinks and claims he has to go before walking away to the sound of cheers and goodbyes thrown his way before they’re replaced by a song he doesn’t recognize.

Still fighting the dark cloud of memories, Martino’s just turned around a bend in the path which finally cuts him off from the joyful singing, when Nico’s voice comes up from the radio in his pocket.

“I haven’t seen any fireworks in a while, should I take it as a good sign?”

Relieved at the distraction, Martino immediately picks up the radio. 

“Are you spying on me?”

“Just making sure I won’t have to ask somebody to retrieve your body and send it back to Italy.”

“Why, has that happened before?”

There is a very ominous pause before Nico speaks again, in a tone that seems way too light to be actually serious. “Do you really want to know?”

“I think I’m fine with not knowing.”

“That’s fair,” Nico concedes with a smile evident in his voice, so he must have been kidding. “Either way, congratulations on surviving your first hostile encounter.”

“They weren’t really hostile.”

“No?” As usual, Nico’s answer is curious where he could easily have been dismissive if he had better to do than hear all the details of Martino’s encounter with a fire hazard.

“No, they were mostly drunk.”

“Let me guess, they were college students?”

“At least they seemed the type.”

“We always get some every year. They’re mostly harmless and at least when they fuck up, it’s usually accidental. Occasionally, one will fall into the lake,” he continues casually as if that was no big deal.

“I’m a college student,” Martino replies, not sure why he volunteers the information, whether he means it as a way to separate himself from the kind of people who threaten to cause fires or risk drowning themselves or just to keep the conversation going.

“So am I.” The reply is not what Martino was expecting.

“I kind of thought you worked here all year long.”

“I wish, I love this place. Maybe when I'm done with my thesis, I’ll get to come back and move into my lookout permanently.”

Despite knowing that Nico can’t see him, Martino can’t help a grimace at the idea.

“Really? All year long?”

“Yes, can’t you picture it? Dominating the forest? Just the wildlife and the occasional visitor? Nobody to question your every move?”

“No Internet, no bars. No toilets,” Martino adds, pushing away the image of having to use the outhouse in the middle of winter.

“Fine, you got me there. But it’s still a nice thought.”

As he climbs over a branch that lays across the trail, Martino considers his surroundings, taking in the birdsong above him and the rustling of leaves being disturbed by animals he can’t see. It certainly is a nice thought, but Martino knows himself too well to believe that he would stand to live like this for more than three months. If he is entirely honest with himself, it probably also helps that right now, the alternative is having to face everybody back home.

“Or are you too much of a city man to be able to imagine it, Martino Rametta?” Nico continues, as if answering Martino’s considerations.

“Oh, definitely.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind in 3 months.”

“Maybe.” The word itself may be noncommittal, but he is pretty sure that his tone betrays his uncertainty. “Where did you live in Italy?”

“Florence.”

“So, you’re a city man yourself.”

Nico hums thoughtfully before answering. “Not really, I never loved it. I like wide spaces much better. Cities are too constraining.”

“Yeah.” That’s one point Martino would agree on. It was what had drawn him to the ad he had found on a shady-looking website that had turned out to be more legit than he could have hoped. At least, in a national park on another continent, he wouldn’t be stuck between the silence of his mother’s flat and the awkwardness of dinners with his dad’s new family.

“Give this place a chance, Marti. I bet you won’t regret it.”

“I’m here, so I don’t have a choice now.”

“That’s the spirit,” Nico laughs. “And you just successfully prevented a potential fire, so congratulations. You’re a natural.”

The compliment may feel underserved given how easy it had been to resolve the situation, but it brings a smile to Martino’s face and finishes lifting his spirits back up.

“Thank you. I think I’m going to be very good at staring at the canopy.”

“I’m sure you will be.”

As he takes the turn at the last fork in the path before his lookout, Martino comes to a standstill. In the middle of the trail, a stag is standing here, frozen in a surprised attitude pretty similar to his own. Wild animals tend to all look the same to Martino, but his antlers seem around the same size as the deer he had encountered two days ago and since they’re not that far from where they had run into each other, he feels confident enough to assume that this might be the same animal. It feels a little like running into his neighbor at the door of his mother’s flat, except he’s not sure how much damage this neighbor might do if he decided to assert his dominance over the area.

The stag takes a few steps to get out of the path and stops to sniff at the ground at the edge of the undergrowth. Martino waits for a few seconds and as the stag continues his exploration of the ground, he takes one slow step, and then another, cautiously passing the animal while giving him a wide berth.

The stag looks up again once he’s at a safe distance and for some reason, Martino feels compelled to nod in thanks. The deer stares at him for a moment, then goes back to mouthing at some seedling on the ground, effectively turning his back on Martino.


	5. Day 7

The sun is high in the sky and the day is toeing the line between warm and hot when Martino steps outside with a plateful of food to enjoy the view from a slightly different angle while he has his lunch.

He’s been here a week and he’s fallen into a rhythm. As there are windows all around the cabin to give him a panoramic view of the area, he wakes up when the sun rises, earlier than he’s ever naturally woken up in his life, starts feeling famished as the sun reaches its peak and goes to bed once the sky has turned a dark blue and he has to choose between turning the light on and being flooded by mosquitoes or letting the cool air of the night in.

He puts his plate down on the railing facing south, in front of his favorite view. In the distance, the forest dips down and seems to stretch endlessly towards the horizon. It’s the first time since he’s got here that he’s having food that doesn’t come straight from a can and he’s been enjoying every forkful of it.

While unpacking on his first day, he had been surprised to find a bag of pasta rolled in a tee-shirt, where his mom had managed to slip it unnoticed with a note suggesting he ate them when he felt homesick. Martino doesn’t actually feel homesick, quite the opposite, as he’s too caught up in not having to worry about anything but his immediate needs and any concerning change in the landscape around him, but it’s been a week and he feels like it’s worth celebrating. His mom won’t need to know what he was celebrating.

Just as he’s about to take another bite, a bird, a peregrine falcon, as he's learned from perusing _Birds of Wyoming_ whenever he needs a break from staring at the sunny landscape, lands in a flurry just an arm’s length away from him. Startled by its sudden appearance, Martino almost knocks the plate to the ground and only manages to catch it by a miracle although he has to watch half of its content splatter fifteen meters below. So much for celebrating.

The bird squawks and flaps its wings, and Martino levels it with his best glare.

“Yeah, screw you, too.”

At the words, or perhaps sensing the distinct unfriendliness in his tone, the falcon flies away again, only to land at the top of the tower as if daring Martino to come after it. Raising his hand to shade his eyes, he looks up at the roof and immediately dismisses the idea, no matter how much the perspective of giving the damn bird a good fright seems tempting. As much as he had been enjoying the pasta, he’s not sure it is quite worth ending up with a broken limb or two this far from all civilization.

So, instead, he half-heartedly turns away from the falcon and leans over the railing again to assess the damage. Directly below him, a young stag has appeared and is stretching out his neck to inspect the fallen food. This time, it only takes a quick glance at the spots on his fur and the size of his antlers for Martino to be almost certain that it’s his neighbor, the one he caught sight of three times in the past week. The fact that he has decided to venture into exposed territory in the middle of the day is new, however.

On their last encounter, two days earlier, the stag had taken a few steps out of the forest into the clearing at twilight, when it was dark enough that it took Martino almost a minute to notice the figure standing still about five meters away from him. After another staring contest during which Martino had been holding on tight to his book and his flashlight, the stag had chosen to ignore him and continued his casual stroll around the clearing before disappearing back between the trees.

Now, from above him and under the midday sun, Martino watches as the animal takes a careful bite and, seemingly appreciating the lovingly prepared food, another, and then another.

“Hey, you’re welcome!”

He must have misjudged the volume of his own voice because the words echo as they bounce off the trees surrounding them, and the stag startles and disappears back into the forest in a couple of leaps.

A sharp squawk draws Martino’s attention back to the bird that has now landed at the end of the railing and is staring at him blankly. Martino grabs his plate protectively and carries it back inside. It may be too late to save what will make a feast for some of the local wildlife, but he still has almost half left to eat and he fully intends not to let it go to waste.

As he deposits the food onto the desk, he picks up the radio without really thinking about it.

“How bad is it that I’ve started talking to a deer?”

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to hear the telltale crackling that he’s learnt means Nico has picked up his own radio.

“Not as bad as the fact that you can’t even be bothered to say hi anymore.”

“Oh, sorry.”

There is a brief exhale over the line that he can’t quite pinpoint.

“Don’t worry about it, niceties don’t matter here. So, what did Bambi have to say?” Nico asks casually as if this was a regular conversation starter, which it might actually be around these parts.

“Don’t call him Bambi.”

His protest goes completely unacknowledged as Nico continues, “Is it still the same deer?”

“I think so. It really looked like him. And he ate my pasta.”

The words come out perhaps more sullen than the situation warrants and Nico laughs.

“Poor Bambi, he could have found a better meal than the shitty macaroni they buy for us.”

“No, that was pasta I brought,” Martino replies automatically and, he realizes too late, without pausing to think about how it may come off.

Sure enough, there is a brief moment of silence before the radio starts crackling again.

“You brought your own pasta?”

“It was a gift,” Martino attempts to explain defensively, not sure whether or not he’s imagining the slight note of judgement in Nico’s voice.

“Were you already homesick after a week?”

“Definitely not.”

Oddly enough, it seems to have been the answer Nico expected because there is definitely something like smugness in his next reply.

“I told you that you might change your mind about staying here.”

“Is that what you did?” Martino asks, suddenly curious about why Nico sounds so certain that he won’t want to go home. “You came here and then you wouldn’t go back?”

“Pretty much. I took a summer job here after high school, like you did. But then, I didn’t have that much to go back to in Italy, so I sort of stayed all year. And then, I never went back and I started college here.”

“And you don’t miss home?”

Only when his eyes fall on the now cold pasta does Martino realize he’s completely forgotten about how hungry he had been mere minutes earlier. For all that he and Nico have been sporadically chatting all week about the park, the visitors or the trees he seems to have a special fondness for, it’s the first time he’s volunteering personal information beyond a city name or a vague reference to girl troubles. Martino has not been that much more forthcoming either, not keen on getting into the details of the how and why he ended up here, but he finds that he doesn’t want to put down the radio and sever the connection with Nico. So far, his only other interactions with living beings have been with the falcon and the stag and they’ve remained pretty one-sided.

“Italy’s not really been home for a while now,” Nico replies in a tone that Martino could picture coming with a shrug. He doesn’t sound that upset about it, more like he’s stating a fact.

“Is it here then?”

Across the line, Nico heaves a brief sigh. “I don’t really know, home means different things to different people, you know?”

“I guess.”

The topic makes Martino think of Rome and of his friends. He had never imagined he might call anywhere else home, but he’s starting to get that when home becomes too painful to think about, it can be a matter of self-preservation to assign it to somewhere else. The thought hits a little too close to the things he doesn’t want to think about, so he tries to venture on a slightly different path.

“So, you come here every summer?”

“Yep, for 6 years.”

“And now you get to boss people around?”

“Exactly. They don’t just let anybody do that. You have to put in the hours and defeat the outhouse before you get promoted.”

Out of habit, Martino makes a face, only realizing too late that Nico won’t see it. “Hm, I think I’m fine living without that promotion.”

“But you get a bigger lookout and the best view in all of the Shoshone. Even the bed’s more comfortable than down in Two Forks.”

“You’ve been in my tower?” Upon hearing the familiar name, Martino glances around the cabin in a futile attempt to picture someone he’s never seen occupying the space.

“Oh, yes. That was my lookout for my first four years. I know the area by heart, but Thorofare’s a bit far to go back and visit.”

“How far are you?” Ignoring the food and his growling stomach, Martino goes back outside to stand near the railing and stare at the landscape in a way that’s become almost second nature now. He’s examined every inch of the view around him and he’s only seen one other cabin that seems to rest on the flank of a mountain up in the north. As he finds it again, he’s hit with the absolute certainty that this is where Nico is and that he can almost see a figure move around in the very small square far in the distance.

“I think it’s about 20 kilometers if you take that trail that goes north from your place.”

“Twenty?” Martino repeats incredulously. That was a little less than what he had had to hike on the day when he arrived, weighed down by his bursting backpack and two days of travel, and just the thought of having to walk that far again makes him want to go lie down. But luckily, like so many other things, he doesn’t have to worry about that for three more months. “So, there aren’t many chances of running into you?”

“No, they’re pretty low.” The slight disappointment the answer brings on surprises Martino. He had been convinced that having minimal contact with people for the whole summer was all he wanted, but he’s become curious about Nico, the Italian who left everything behind to look out for fires on a different continent. The thought’s interrupted by the sudden excitement in Nico’s voice. “But, hey, first one to see the other wins.”

His enthusiasm at this perspective brings a smile to Martino’s face as he sits down against the railing. “Wins what?”

“The pleasure of seeing another human being.”

“If I wanted to see other human beings, I could have stayed in Rome,” Martino teases.

“Ah, I knew you came here because of someone.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“If you don’t want to be around people, I’ll bet it’s because there’s really one person you don’t want to see.”

A few faces cross Martino’s mind and he pushes himself up and heads back inside to settle on the bed.

“Is that why you left Florence? To avoid someone?” Maybe turning the question back to Nico might be taking the easy way out, but the good thing about their situation is that it’s almost impossible to force anyone to answer any questions if they don’t want to. All it takes is putting the radio down.

“Not really. There weren’t many people left to avoid. Now, it's your turn, were you avoiding anyone? I want to know if I'm right.” Nico has obviously caught on to Martino's methods and is using them against him.

“Yeah. A lot of people, actually,” Martino finally admits, finding it easier to face the truth when there’s no way to know if Nico's expression holds any judgement. “But if you weren't avoiding anyone, you didn’t really have girl troubles, did you?”

“Technically, kind of. Girl troubles, boy troubles. All kinds of troubles.” For a moment, there is no sound in the cabin other than the crackling of the radio and the creaking of the bed as Martino sits up with interest at Nico’s choice of words. ”So whatever brought you here, trust me, I get it,” Nico continues, uncharacteristically serious.

Martino keeps his thumb pressed over the button while he inhales slowly, weighing his options and deciding whether or not to be honest in return. In the end, it’s the fact that he doesn’t know Nico and that he’s the only person he can tell who’s not directly involved in the whole thing that makes him say it.

“There wasn’t just one thing. But for the most part, it was sort of friend trouble, sort of boy trouble.”

There’s silence on the line for long enough that he starts worrying that he got Nico’s meaning wrong until Nico sighs.

“Yeah, I know those too.” The answer sparks Martino’s curiosity, but Nico moves on before either of them can dwell on it. “What kind of other troubles did you have?”

“College stuff, parents stuff. You, too?”

“School not so much, but parents stuff, yes, definitely.”

What little has just passed between them is vague and unspecified, and they barely know each other, but still, across the 20 kilometers of forest and valley separating them, some kind of understanding passes through the radio.

“My parents are getting a divorce,” Martino offers, because out of everything, it’s probably the easiest one to talk about. It’s also the only one that stems from other people’s questionable choices and not his. “It’s the fucking worst.”

“Shit, sorry. It’s not going well?”

“That’s an understatement,” Martino replies with a bitter edge to his voice that has become only too familiar in the past year and that he hates a little bit more every time he hears it. “Did it help with any of it, coming here?”

“Kind of. At first, it was just amazing to take a step back and get some new perspective, but it’s not like coming here for three months solves anything.”

“So, running away from your problems doesn’t really work?”

“Unfortunately, no. But sometimes, there’s an actual fire and then, all your shit seems way less important,” Nico adds with a teasing note that Martino is grateful for as the conversation was threatening to turn a bit too heavy for his comfort.

“Are you saying I should be hoping for a fire?”

“As part of the fire safety crew, I can’t officially tell you that, no.”

Martino laughs. “I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.”

The pasta has gone completely cold by the time Nico excuses himself to talk to another lookout. It’s not like either of them is going anywhere for the foreseeable future, but when he promises to be back soon, Martino feels relieved.

He eats the cold food sitting at the bottom of the stairs to his lookout while keeping a watchful eye around for any hungry animal. The food that fell to the ground has now completely disappeared and Martino wonders if the stag came back to finish his lunch or if some other creature took advantage of both their absences to partake in an impromptu feast.

He’s on his way south to explore the shores of Ruby River when Nico’s voice comes up from the side pocket of his backpack. Once he’s taken off the pack, fished out the radio and figured out that Nico was asking if the stag - that he insists on calling Bambi - left a review for his pasta, Martino realizes that as much as he enjoys talking to Nico about anything, he’s glad that they don’t have to continue rehashing their respective issues. He’s had enough for one day.

“What’s Nico short for?” He asks out of the blue a few minutes later, which earns him a probably deservedly sarcastic answer.

“What could it possibly be short for?”

“I don’t know,” Martino begins, wishing he had thought it through before he asked. He wracks his brain for something. “Nicodemo.”

“You got it on your first try, well done.”

“I don’t believe you,” Martino retorts. “Nicolai?”

“Do you think I’m secretly Russian? Why are you even asking?”

“You know my full name and I don’t. That’s not fair. Nicostrato?”

“That’s not even a name, come on. It’s Niccolò.”

“I wasn’t done guessing, and yes, it is a real name.”

“Your guesses were shit, and I don't believe you.”

Briefly, Martino feels almost disappointed that the mysterious stranger he finds himself so intrigued by doesn’t have a grander name than Niccolò. But after a second, it occurs to him that from what he's learned so far, Nico seems just like him, a little bit of a screw-up who tried to outrun his problems and to find solutions on the other side of the ocean. So, maybe it does suit him.  


When he learns of Martino's destination, Nico declares that he doesn’t have anything else to do and offers to keep him company while he explores the area. Throughout the afternoon, he takes to offering tidbits of information about any place that Martino describes to him. At one point, Martino falls in admiration with an oddly, almost ominously shaped tree that looks straight out of a witch story from a kids' book. When he mentions it to Nico, he immediately recognizes it as cottonwood and starts - there really is no other word for it - nerding out about some of the local species, which is how Martino discovers that Nico started studying forestry management after his second summer as a lookout and is now using his summer job as the basis for his thesis. He sounds so enthusiastic about it that Martino’s embarrassed to admit that he’s currently making his way through a degree in economics that he has nothing but contempt for. Fortunately, and following the pattern of all their previous conversations, Nico doesn’t judge and steers the subject away from college back to the unique species of trees found in the Shoshone with enough ease that Martino wonders if that hadn’t been his agenda all along.

Before he realizes how long has passed, Martino looks up to find the sun headed firmly west, not quite ready to disappear behind the peak that dominates the horizon, but close enough that he has to start making his way back if he doesn’t want to end up hiking in the dark.

Back in his lookout Martino drops down on his bed, exhausted, sore, but also inexplicably lighter. Nico, who has been silent for several minutes, starts speaking again in an almost hushed voice.

“Marti, your friend troubles, I hope it gets better. But in my experience, if it’s a real friend, it’s going to work itself out.”

Hope surges in Martino’s mind at the conviction in his voice, pushing away the doubt that had taken residence there for the past six months. He holds the radio close and finds himself responding in hushed tones as well.

“You think so?”

“Yes, I think so,” Nico repeats, just as low but still so sure.

“Thanks, Nico.”

“Good night, Marti.”

With one last effort, Martino manages to take his clothes off, do some brief washing up above his sink and hang his clothes out to air over the railing. As he follows the already familiar gestures, he keeps remembering snippets of his conversation with Nico. Conversations, really, given how many times they had jumped from topic to topic, sometimes remaining silent for longer stretches of time as one of them became absorbed in whatever he was doing.

It was not what he had expected coming here. He hadn’t expected to bond with anyone, in fact he had actively embraced the fact that he wouldn’t have to, that there wouldn’t even be anyone to bond with. But Nico’s presence, as immaterial as it may be and perhaps because of it, is comforting without being overbearing. It’s like having a benevolent being watching over him that he can reach with just a press of a button. It feels really nice.


	6. Day 23

Martino is bored, so unbelievably bored. He doesn’t think he remembers ever being this bored in his life despite taking two years of economics classes he never managed to care about.

Although he slept heavily through the night like he’s been doing since he got here, he woke up in a funk. Since then, he’s felt antsy and dissatisfied, unable to do more than pace around the room without settling to anything. The mere idea of everything that he had found new and enjoyable when he arrived is making his skin crawl. To make matters worse, the fact that this is how he’s feeling after only three weeks has led him to wonder if he’s just doomed to keep falling into patterns more or less by choice, only to start hating them once they’ve become familiar.

He’s left behind the econ degree he spent two years working towards, the too-familiar walls of his mother’s flat, his father’s disinterested attempts at getting together his new family with the old one, even the usually comforting banter of his friends, and all for what? Back home, he may not have been bored as much as he felt that he was watching everything happen in spite of himself, but the end result is the same.

Then, he had felt like setting his entire life on fire. Now, he’s tired of the canned food, of staring at the unchanging canopy, of hiking, of reading, of lying down in the grass by the lake, of the routine he’s settled in, of the small, stiff bed, of the birds chattering above his tower every single morning. He’s not even a third of the way through his contract and he can’t stand the sight of the fucking forest anymore.

As his restless eyes fall on a notepad sitting on the desk, he wishes he could draw like Luca, at least he could go out and find something to capture his inspiration. If he could play music like Gio or Elia, he might be able to find a melody in the rushing of the waterfall in Cottonwood Creek. If he had a football, he could use two aspen trees down in Five Mile Creek as goalposts and pretend the reason he manages to score every time is because of Peccio’s shitty goalkeeping skills.

But there’s nothing to do, it’s just him standing like an idiot in the middle of a wooden tower, looking for fires that are nowhere to be seen.

Resting by the sink, his gaze finds the matches he uses to light his gas stove and warm up can of beans after can of beans. At the back of his mind, an unhelpful little voice tells him that having an actual fire would give him something to do. He ignores it, of course, he’s no arsonist, but even if the thought is gone as soon as it is formed, it just adds to the bad mood that is threatening to engulf the rest of his stay.

The itch to do something, anything, seems ready to consume him so he does the only thing that doesn’t make him feel sick, he picks up the radio.

“I’m so fucking bored,” he moans.

A few seconds pass before the radio crackles and laughter filters through.

“As your supervisor, I don’t know if you should be telling me that.”

The familiar voice immediately brings a smile to his face and the situation suddenly doesn’t seem quite so dire anymore.

“What are you going to do about it? Fire me? At least, it would give me something to do,” he jokes.

“Firing a lookout would be way too much of a pain in my ass and I, unlike some people, actually have shit to do.”

“What are you doing?” The question sounds so eager that Nico laughs at him again, but Martino doesn’t care, he’ll take any idea.

“Reading about soil enzymes. Do you want me to tell you about it?”

Martino deflates. “Tempting, but I think I’d rather be bored.”

“What’s happening, are you already out of books to read? I’m pretty sure there were a bunch last time I was in Two Forks.”

“No, there are. I’m just…” To anybody else, he might have been embarrassed to admit that he just doesn’t want to do anything, but one of the best things about his radio relationship with Nico is that he doesn’t have to worry about feeling judged. He can’t picture the disappointed expression on a face he’s never seen and since Nico started opening up about what brought him here, they’ve both been almost equal in sharing. Somehow, the absence of expectations on either side makes it easier to pick up the radio all throughout the day and keep broken conversations as they go about their respective tasks. So, even if he feels slightly childish for the words, it isn’t hard to say, “I don’t feel like doing anything.”

As Martino has come to expect, Nico hums understandingly. The answer that comes after that, however, is not one he could have predicted. “Yeah, that tends to happen.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been there. You’re a bit early, it often happens around the one-month mark, but yes, a lot of lookouts feel this way at some point.”

“You mean that it’s normal?” Relief washes over him at the thought that he might not be fundamentally dissatisfied and that there could be a logical explanation.

“You’ve gotten into a routine and now you’re stuck, right?”

“Kinda, yes.”

“That’s the downside of this job. There isn’t that much to do, so you can quickly start going around in circles.”

For all that he feels slightly better upon hearing this, it doesn’t actually solve Martino’s immediate problem or tell him how to make the itch go away.

“What’s the solution, then?”

“You change it up.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s not a magic cure, but it helps. You don’t have to change everything, you can just try one new thing, see where it gets you,” Nico explains and he makes it sound so simple that Martino already feels like he’s breathing a bit easier. “You must have been bored with your life before.”

“Yes.” His reply comes out way too quickly, but it gets him a sympathetic huff of laughter over the radio.

“What did you do then?

“I came here.”

“That’s a bit extreme,” Nico comments, still sounding amused.

“Isn’t that what you did, too?”

“More or less, but extreme is sort of my thing.”

“How do you know it’s not my thing too?”

Nico doesn’t even answer but his silence speaks volume, and Martino is a little miffed at being so easily read, especially as it doesn’t seem like an entirely fair assessment. But to prove Nico wrong, he’d have to own up to things that wouldn’t paint him in the best light and he’s been enjoying talking to someone who doesn’t know of his every mistake.

“How do you change it up, then?” He asks instead, getting them back to his current issue. “There’s only so much I can do, I’m pretty sure I’ve already followed every single trail in my sector, the ones that aren’t blocked at least.”

“Get off the trails, then,” Nico suggests simply.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to do that.” A lifetime of “keep off the grass” signs and warnings about restoration of the ecosystems has ingrained the idea in Martino’s brain that paths were sacred and that he should never stray from them, all the more so in a place like a national park. He’s pretty sure one of the manuals he had started to reread in his desperate search for some stimulation had had a lot to say about preserving endangered species.

“You’re a lookout, who’s going to stop you?”

And somehow, that settles that, and 15 minutes later, Martino is walking along the edge of the clearing where his tower stands, looking for a gap in the undergrowth that doesn’t look too forbidding. After a few more minutes, when one bush has started to blend in with all the other bushes, he gives up, picks one that doesn’t have any thorns, and pushes his way through.

Forty minutes later, he isn’t bored anymore, but he is many other things, including tired, sore, hyper focused on where he chooses to put his feet on the ground after almost, and then actually, tripping on roots he hadn’t noticed, as well as bordering on annoyed.

He had been right about paths having a purpose and it’s not just to protect endangered species, it’s also so he doesn’t have to constantly contort himself to pass over or under branches and roots, avoid young saplings and have unidentified bugs land on him from every direction.

At this point, he could just call it a day, say he tried and head back, but he’s come so far and even his current situation seems more appealing than the dauntingly empty and overfamiliar lookout. So he keeps going, even though the way only gets trickier as the forest gets denser. Luckily, it’s still early enough in the day that he won’t have to worry about darkness for hours and by then, he really hopes he will be out of here and back in more open territory.

Of course, in his life, Martino’s been in his fair share of forests but one thing he never paid that much attention to in all the Italian forests he visited is how noisy they can be. In this one, especially here, right in the thick of it, it’s impossible to ignore. He’s spent enough time by now leafing through _Birds of Wyoming_ to be aware of how many different species live in the state and he may not be hearing them all, but there must be quite a good sample. In addition to the birdsong and the other, slightly less comforting, animal noises, grunting, scratching and scuffling that come up every once in a while, the trees themselves seem to be speaking their own language through the rustle of their leaves or the creaking of their branches.

All of these sounds have been mixing together as he progresses through the forest until they make up a soothing background, so when a much louder, sharper crack sounds, it’s distinctive enough to make him freeze. He’s starting to regret not having paid closer attention to the section of his binder on animal attacks, but he’s pretty sure that remaining still is a technique that works against at least some of them. He simply hopes that whatever is responsible for that sound is one of those species.

When nothing happens, no footsteps are heard walking or running in his direction, he decides that it must be safe enough to move and grabs hold of a massive branch to push it out of his way. He takes five steps, just enough to move past the branch and freezes again in front of a now familiar sight.

In front of him, the stag is facing him fully, his head held high and legs planted firmly on the ground. Compared to their previous encounters, he shows nothing of his usual skittishness and his attitude looks the picture of defensive. It doesn’t take very long for Martino to figure out why as he catches sight of a young fawn hiding behind him, trembling on thin legs that look way too long for his body.

Curiosity overtakes Martino’s wariness for a second and he takes one single step forward to have a better view of the young animal, only to immediately take two steps back when the stag stomps his feet once and snorts in a definitely unfriendly manner.

Martino doesn’t insist. He keeps an eye on both animals as he beats a slow retreat and lets the branch once again fall behind him before walking away in the general direction he came from, for now more concerned with getting far away from this area of the forest than finding the way back to his lookout.

He waits until he’s at what he assumes to be a safe distance to be out of earshot of the deer before he takes the radio out. Even then, he keeps his voice pretty low.

“Can deer attack people?”

The radio crackles but Nico doesn’t speak right away. Somehow, that crackling feels extremely judgmental to Martino who’s already regretting his question.

“What did you do?” Nico’s tone is a mix of suspicion and repressed glee.

“Nothing.” Martino’s answer is perhaps more defensive than he intends but his heart is still beating a little fast at the way the stag had seemed to show off his antlers and the damage they could cause. “I went off the path and the stag was there, and he kinda looked like he was considering cutting me open.”

The radio crackles again, not as long this time, before Martino hears something that sounds suspiciously like laughter.

“When I said you could change things up, I didn't mean you should start fighting the wildlife.”

“I didn’t fight him!”

“You know, there are grizzly bears around here, if you meet one, you might not get away so easily.”

Martino exhales in annoyance and clumsily climbs over a trunk before picking up the radio again to try to make Nico take him seriously.

“If one of us was ready to fight, it was definitely not me. And he had a fawn with him, he was really tiny. I think he was trying to protect him.”

“Oh, yeah, things can get really tense where there are babies around.” At least, the teasing is gone from Nico's voice now. He even sounds a little sympathetic. “Just stay away from them as much as you can, and you should be fine. If you ever see a grizzly cub, just walk in the other direction and hope that the mom hasn’t seen you already.”

Now that the teasing is no longer at his direct expense, Martino feels himself start to relax and a smile tugs at his lips.

“And what if she’s seen me?”

“I’ll tell your family that you fought bravely.”

“Thank you,” Martino retorts sarcastically. He’s about to put the radio back into his pocket so he can have both hands free to push branches and bugs away from him, but there is still one thing he needs to make clear. “And I wasn’t trying to fight him,” he reiterates for the record. At the responding laughter, his remaining concern continues to melt away, helped by every new step he takes away from the stag’s antlers and threatening attitude.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take him longer than a few minutes to find a trail and step on it with relief. He doesn’t recognize the path right away, but it’s got to lead back to his lookout unless he got turned around so badly that he’s now in a completely different part of the forest, doomed to walk the long way around for hours until he’s safely back in his tower. He just has to figure out which way to go.

There’s a compass sitting in the drawer of his desk, he’s looked at it every day for the past three weeks and he’s never picked it up, out of some kind of conviction that he’s not that desperate. His assessment of the situation changes as he looks up to the canopy blocking the way to the sun and he tries to summon some kind of homing instinct he’s pretty sure only pigeons are supposed to have.

He turns left and hopes for the best.

He makes it back in a little over an hour, with plenty of sunshine left to settle on the walkway surrounding his cabin and scan the index of _Birds of Wyoming_ for the letter “H” for “homing”. Laying on the wood with his aching legs stretched out in the light of the setting sun, he doesn’t feel so restless anymore, and although he doesn’t have any assurance that he won’t start feeling like a caged animal again the next week or the week after that, he’s pretty sure he knows where to find the remedy to it, if not by venturing into the territory of wild animals, maybe simply at the other end of his radio.

Later that night, once the sun has disappeared behind the tree line, Martino drops a few beans leftover from his dinner down from the tower and holds his breath. He holds it for long enough that he has to give in and let out a slow exhale of air, abruptly cut out by the stag walking warily out of the forest, careful step by careful step, until he is standing at the foot of the tower, almost directly below him. He sniffs at the food warily, then looks up toward Martino who doesn’t dare move.

When he finally picks up the beans before looking up again and vanishing back into the forest with his usual speediness, Martino feels like he’s just been given a second chance.


	7. Day 30

“What do you look like?”

The question comes out of nowhere, and it’s a testament to what their days have been like for the past month that it leaves Martino unfazed and continuing to stare in concentration at his map.

“Why do you need to know?”

“I want to draw you.”

The statement, however, manages to catch his attention, because even though it does provide an answer, it also begs more questions. With a frown, Martino lowers the map. “But you can’t see me.”

“That’s why I asked what you look like.”

“I didn’t know you drew.” Forgoing the map for now, Martino returns half of his attention to scanning the undergrowth for the entrance of the trail that’s supposed to be there while keeping the radio at the ready. After his attempt at going entirely off track, he had figured that exploring blocked or abandoned trails might be a better compromise if only because he vividly remembers Nico’s mention of grizzly bears.

“Answer the question, Marti,” is the only response he gets.

Martino abandons his search for the moment to look down at himself. Now that his focus isn’t on his environment, he suddenly becomes hyperaware of the sweat on his brow and the feeling of the dust covering what feels like every inch of exposed skin and a good part of what is hidden as well. He can’t really see himself but he doesn’t think he would paint a very nice picture right now.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he admits. Where should he even begin when Nico has never so much as caught a glimpse of him?

“I’m not asking for details. I can’t see you from here, so just tell me what you think sticks out about you.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got red hair?” He suggests. Enough people have commented on it positively or negatively over the years that it seems like a fair guess. Once that’s done, however, he pretty much runs out of ideas. “You like trees, why can’t you draw a tree? There are so many of them and you can actually look at them.”

“I’ve been coming here for 6 years, do you know how many trees I’ve drawn? I want to draw you”, Nico repeats with more insistence this time. “Red hair, what about your eyes?”

“They’re just brown,” he sighs in a way that, he realizes belatedly, might make his confusion come off as annoyance. Fortunately, Nico is not so easily deterred.

“Brown is good. What else?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think I look like?” He’s fully expecting Nico to call him out on the total lack of subtlety of his deflection, but surprisingly, he doesn’t.

“Good idea, let’s do that. You’ll tell me how warm I am, okay?”

“Okay.”

The radio crackles for a moment, presumably while Nico ponders the question.

“You’re tall,” he states suddenly.

“Tall?” Martino is not sure how Nico could have come to that conclusion and now that he has to think about it, he’s not sure how true it may be either. He considers the height of his friends, of other people in his class, but can only offer a hesitant reply. “Maybe a little above average, but not that much, I don’t think.”

“I think you’re frowning because you think I’m being stupid,” Nico continues without breaking his stride.

Suddenly suspicious, Martino glances at his surroundings to see if anybody could have snuck closer and be observing him. He had indeed been frowning, but Nico got his reasons wrong.

“I don’t think you’re being stupid. I don’t really get it, but I’m not much of an artist.”

“That’s good, that helps.”

Having now fully given up on studying the map, Martino starts trying to fold it back and put it away while processing the odd reply.

“How?”

“Don’t worry about it. What do you like to wear?”

“I… jeans, mostly. Something comfortable.”

“Marti, don’t tell me you’re wearing jeans in this heat.”

Technically, Martino thinks as he looks down at his legs, he is. “That’s all I brought, so I cut off one pair when I got here.” It looks objectively terrible since the only scissors he had found in his lookout had clearly been made to cut gauze or bandages and not fabric, and he hadn’t even dared to touch the axe he had found in the shed behind the outhouse. To add to the effect, he’s gathered quite an impressive collection of scratches and bruises on his legs since then, but at least he doesn’t feel like he’s boiling from the inside anymore. He’ll just have to make the cutoffs disappear before he gets home and Filippo can catch sight of them.

“Why would you only bring jeans to Wyoming in the summer?”

Mostly because by the time he had finally got to packing, as soon as he was done with his last exam, the only thing on his mind had been leaving and severing all ties with anything having to do with econ, which had led him to indiscriminately shove whatever he could get his hands on into his mother’s old hiking pack without much consideration for practicalities such as the weather. He’s not sure he actually wants to say any of that out loud, though, so he redirects the conversation back to a less damning topic.

“Are you also asking for your drawing?”

“Maybe,” Nico replies, a hint of laughter in his voice, before resuming his interrogation. “What’s your favorite color?

“Blue. How can you even use any of this? Are you doing one of those weird modern abstract things? Some kind of collage?”

“Trust the process, Marti.”

Finally, pushing away a low branch, Martino finds the entrance to the hidden trail. It must not have been used in a while, maybe years, because the vegetation has started creeping up over what must once have been a clear path, partially hiding it from view. He steps forward, letting the branch fall back behind him and he will blame the fact that he is focused on locating the path through the undergrowth for not fully thinking through his next question.

“Will you show it to me when it’s done?”

No reply comes at first, for long enough that Martino wonders if he’s made some sort of faux pas. It is possible that there is some understanding that whatever relationship may grow on this job is destined to never exist outside of the park and after summer is over, and that anything else should not be acknowledged. It would seem at odds with Nico’s insistence at trying to get to know more about his life outside the job, but that may just be the result of curiosity or even boredom. In fact, deep down, Martino knows that he and Nico are never going to meet. He just can’t help but think that he would have liked that.

“Maybe,” Nico replies eventually. “Now it’s your turn,” he continues in a blatant attempt to change the subject, but since Martino’s hadn’t been much more subtle earlier, he can’t begrudge him for it. “Tell me something else, I’m doing all the work here.”

“It’s your drawing, you should be doing all the work.”

“You’re supposed to help. Come on, tell me one thing you think I could never guess.”

The answer slips out almost automatically, as his eyes move from the sprouts covering the path to the ink peeking over the top of his boots. “I’ve got tattoos.”

“Really?” Judging by Nico’s tone, his answer seems to have served its purpose. “Do tell.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Martino repeats. “I already gave you a clue, you wanted to guess before, so guess.”

He’s expecting Nico to protest, because how could he possibly guess, but once again, he just takes it in stride. Martino wonders how slow his afternoon must be that this is how he chooses to entertain himself. But then again, if he had to write a thesis, Martino might also prefer to try guessing a stranger’s tattoo.

“Is it your mom’s name?” Nico begins, almost eagerly. “The Chinese word for ‘egg roll’? Strawberries?” He pauses for a second and Martino briefly wonders if he’s done until Nico offers his next suggestion, and the conversation doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. “The name of your first love?”

Unbeknownst to Nico, the innocent suggestion brings with it a familiar pang that has long been associated with Martino’s first, very much unrequited, crush. Unfortunately, since New Year’s, thinking about Gio inevitably leads to thinking about Eva and the angry, drunken words he had thrown at her during what was supposed to be a party and in front of an audience he hadn’t realized was there until it was too late to take anything back.

Luckily, before he can bury himself again in rehashing past terrible decisions like he had been doing for five months before he came here and managed to put some distance with the whole fucking mess, Nico seems to have one more guess and he’s still impossibly far from the truth. 

“A portrait of Adam Smith?”

“Do you have any idea who Adam Smith is?”

“I know they give lectures about him, so he must be important.”

Martino laughs again at that, but it comes out more bitter than he would like as he remembers his professor banging on and on about the dude until Martino was bored to death of his very name.

“No, not really.”

“Okay.” No more suggestions come and Martino has to focus when the trail briefly disappears between two overgrown bramble bushes if he doesn’t want to add too many new scratches to his collection. He almost startles when Nico speaks again suddenly, louder than before, as if he had just had a realization. “How do I even know that you have tattoos and that you’re not bullshitting me so you don’t have to give me real answers?”

“I don’t know, how do I know you can actually draw and you’re not asking bullshit questions?” Martino shoots back.

“Don’t you trust me?” There is a hint of offense in the question, and although Martino’s pretty sure it’s pretend, he can’t be entirely sure.

“I don’t know.” His answer, however, is clearly teasing.

“After everything we’ve been through, Marti?” Nico questions now clearly jokingly, much to Martino’s relief.

“What have we been through exactly?”

“I can’t believe this. We stopped a fire together!”

“When?” All thoughts of teasing are gone, as Martino can’t be anything but flabbergasted at this assertion. Surely, he would remember stopping a fire.

“‘When?’ What kind of lookout are you? Those guys with the fireworks, they were a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Oh, so when you say _we_ stopped a fire, you mean _I_ did.” Just calling it stopping a fire is very much a stretch as there was no guarantee that the guys would have set fire to anything and even if they had, they were close enough to the lake that the worst could have been avoided, but Martino doesn’t mind counting it as a victory. He could use a few.

“But who told you there were fireworks?”

Martino considers for a moment nitpicking some more about this, but as he turns the sentence in his head, he has to admit that it’s nice to be a “we” again instead of an “I”. There’s been a lot more of him on his own than he would have liked this year.

“Okay. I guess we stopped a fire.”

“See? We make a pretty good team.”

“That’s true.”

As the path emerges from the forest to slither across a vast plain, Martino takes a moment to embrace the view opening in front of him while also appreciating the warm contented feeling that blooms through his entire body at Nico’s words. He’s just started walking again when the radio crackles.

“Were you lying about the tattoos?” There is no accusation or teasing in Nico’s voice anymore, simply curiosity.

“No, I do have them. But no names, no Adam Smith, no strawberries. Were you lying about the drawing?”

“No, there’s a drawing. Maybe when you get home, I could send it to you.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“Okay, then you’ll see.”

He sounds certain and confident and Martino doesn’t want to start getting his hopes up, he really doesn’t, but he does like the sound of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full offence to Adam Smith.


	8. Day 52

When Martino’s eyes blink open, he doesn’t have any idea what woke him up. It wasn’t a sudden noise because he doesn’t jerk awake, just slips out of his slumber back into the small cabin. The first reaction he registers is surprise to be met by the darkness of night. Since he got here, he hasn’t been waking up in the middle of the night like he used to at home, where he would startle awake for no discernible reason with his mind always too wired to let him go back to sleep.

Of course, it’s never completely dark inside the tower as it bathes in the moonlight that flows above the canopy right into the windows that line the entire room. The only time he had had to resort to turning on his flashlight to move around after nightfall had been a couple of nights where the sky had been heavily overcast, making the atmosphere stifling and muggy.

He casts a bleary look around for any sign of a bird or any animal that might have broken in and woken him up when the radio crackles from where it sits on the crate he uses as a nightstand.

“Marti?” Nico’s voice comes hushed and low from next to Martino’s head, almost as if they were both lying down right next to each other, a strange thought which Martino doesn’t dwell on. Fighting the drowsiness that still clings to him, Martino manages to lie down on his stomach, his face still buried in his pillow, and blindly grabs for the radio. He turns his head just enough to be heard.

“What?”

“Have you seen the stars tonight?”

“What?” Martino repeats as the puzzling question makes its slow way through his brain until it reaches the right neuron. He turns to his side and props himself up on his elbow. “No, I was sleeping.”

“They’re so beautiful.” Across the forest, the words don’t come out as sharp and clear as they usually do, almost as if the faintest wind was blowing over the radio, as if Nico was outside, in the middle of the night.

That thought is the one that breaks through the fog of sleepiness, enough that Martino sits up.

“What time is it? Why are you up?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t feel like sleeping so I went outside and the sky’s so big, Marti. There are stars everywhere and they’re reflecting on the water like they’re infinite. Can you see them?”

Unthinkingly, Martino turns to the nearest window when something Nico said catches his still sleep-muddled attention.

Nico mentioned water, and the main body of water in the area is Jonesy Lake, which is only a thirty-minute hike from Martino’s tower. Despite his body rebelling at the idea of getting up so early and the part of himself that grew up in a city and doesn’t want to know what roams through the woods at night, he realizes he could easily go there as well, he could join Nico. The thought is enough to make him push back his cover and plant his feet on the ground.

But then, another thought stops him before he can stand up. The lake may be less than 3 kilometers from where he is, but it’s got to be over 20 from Nico’s lookout.

“You’re at Jonesy Lake?” Concern laces his voice now and he can feel a frown pinch his forehead.

“No, at a basin just west from my lookout. But hey,” his voice suddenly sounds stronger, as if he had sat up as well or had found renewed energy. “I could go there. And you could come too and we could meet up at the lake.”

He sounds like he’s moving now, his clothes are rustling and his breathing becomes more uneven with the effort of getting up and starting to walk.

“Nico, wait,” Martino calls out, getting up and coming to stand at his north-facing window where, in the daylight, he can see Nico’s lookout, as if he could somehow stop him from there. “It’s really far and it’s the middle of the night, are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Martino thinks about the uneven terrain, the barely defined trails, and actively pushes out of his mind whatever animals could be lurking in the forest in the dark, some of which have to be much less friendly than his deer neighbor. He still hasn’t seen any trace of them, but the signs warning of the presence of bears in the park are everywhere and his binder had helpfully laid out everything he needed to do in case of an encounter. Out of everything the manual had taught him, it’s probably the knowledge he’s the least eager to put in practice.

Nico still hasn’t said anything so Martino goes outside, leans over the railing and bites his nail nervously, wondering what he’s supposed to do if the person he reports to for everything is the one who gets in trouble. Even worse, what would he do if anything happened to Nico?

Luckily, before he can go into a tailspin of guilt and worry, he hears the familiar crackling of the radio and he’s never been so grateful for the antiquated technology the park still uses.

“You’re right.” Nico’s voice has gone back to its hushed tones. “I’m going to head back and let you get some sleep. I’m sorry for waking you up.” Martino lifts up the radio, ready to answer that he doesn’t mind, but Nico continues in the same hushed, reverent tones before he can open his mouth. “But you’ll see, Marti, one day I’m going to show you the stars.”

After that, there is silence. It feels all the more deep for the weight Nico’s put in his last few words and the way they land straight into Martino’s heart. His thumb on the button, Martino stares at the radio for a moment, turns the words around in his head, but in the end, he just goes back inside, unable to figure out what to answer to that.

Martino keeps the radio in his pocket throughout the entire morning, waiting for a sign from Nico. The radio remains silent however, and Martino tries not to worry. He tells himself that if Nico was walking around late last night, he’s probably still sleeping it off, and yet, he picks up the radio three separate times, ready to make sure he did get back okay.

It’s early afternoon, as the sun reaches its peak in the sky, when Nico greets him happily and launches into a story about another lookout waking up to find the hiking shoes he had left outside his door almost entirely gnawed out.

The rest of the day goes as usual, with Nico ready to impart his thoughts on whatever grabs his attention as well as to react to any small talk Martino offers in response. Never at any point does he mention the night, so Martino doesn’t either.

Three days later, as Martino wakes up to the dark of night once again, but with no voice calling out for him this time, he starts to wonder if he might not have dreamed the whole thing.


	9. Day 63

“Marti? Are you busy?”

Without breaking eye contact with the intruder that is sitting on his window sill, Martino picks up his radio.

“Do you think falcons can hold grudges?”

Nico doesn’t laugh, in fact he doesn't dignify the question with an answer, and fine, it was probably a dumb question, but Martino feels like he still deserved some kind of reaction.

Finally conceding the staring contest to the bird that has not moved since it landed here, only separated from Martino’s face by what had then felt like a very thin windowpane, he looks down at the book resting on his desk. The bird’s ability to sit completely still with his eyes boring a hole through Martino’s is pretty uncanny and a little disturbing, especially given that Elia had made them all watch _The Birds_ last Halloween, so he’s glad to have a distraction.

“Everything okay?” He attempts another question, one that is probably easier to answer.

“Someone called the head office asking to talk to you. They can put him through to you if you want,” Nico states, also ignoring that question. At least, the piece of information is enough to finish distracting Martino completely. He can only think of one person who would be stubborn enough to track him down as far as the middle of the US just to make him feel even worse about his life choices.

“What does my dad want?” He groans, abandoning the desk to head out on the walkway, already sensing that the conversation may require a lot of pacing.

“I don’t think it’s your dad, actually.” The uncertainty in Nico’s tone is not helping make Martino less nervous. “It’s Giovanni,” he adds with an almost questioning inflection.

The surprise is enough to make Martino stop his preemptive pacing and he finds the falcon’s eyes again from the other end of the walkway.

“Oh.”

After a second, the bird flies away as if to give him some privacy. Martino suddenly wishes it would come back and tell him what he’s supposed to do.

“I can tell him that I couldn’t get a hold of you if you want.”

And just like that, it’s the offer, Nico being ready to lie for him, that convinces him. He’s not sure he could live with so many people willing to let him get away with his bullshit. He’s avoided his friends enough, the forest surrounding him is a constant reminder of the lengths he went to, and there are only so many times he can keep pushing them away. And out of all them, if someone deserves an answer from him, it’s Gio.

“No, it’s fine. How does it work? Can you put him through directly to me?”

In the silence that follows, Martino contemplates all possible options, from running off and spending the rest of the summer in that cave down by Thunder Canyon where surely even the radio wouldn’t work to bribing the falcon to peck him to death or something. The answer to his question comes unexpectedly after a brief crackle that doesn’t leave him nearly enough time to prepare himself.

“Hey, cowboy.”

Martino isn’t sure how he expected Gio to open the conversation, but this was not it. Despite the atrociously exaggerated American accent he tries to put on, his best friend’s voice through the radio is as much as balm as it is a brash reminder of everything he’s been trying to forget for the past two months. Despite standing for his latest fuck-ups in a long line of fuck-ups, Giovanni’s always been home to him so familiarity and relief flow through him, pushing away some of his nerves.

“I’m not a cowboy.” Despite the slight quiver to his voice, Martino can feel a smile tugging at his lips that he couldn’t fight even if he wanted to.

“Are you telling me you’re too busy putting out fires and everything to herd some cows?”

Just like that, everything feels normal, like there aren’t thousands of kilometers between them and like Martino hasn’t barely spoken to his best friend for months until he announced that he was leaving for the summer.

Martino huffs a brief laugh. “I’m not a firefighter either, Gio.”

“No? Then what is it that you do? Nobody really got a chance to ask.”

There is no reproach in Gio’s voice, just more curiosity than a question about a summer job should warrant, as well as the worry that’s been ever-present since Martino started not-so-discreetly making himself scarce after the New Year fiasco.

“I’m in a national park, I’m looking out in case there’s fires.” It sounds so incredibly lame, so not worth travelling 9 000 kilometers with barely a word of warning to everyone when he puts it like that. For the first time in weeks, he wishes he could have the Internet on hand to send Gio the much more convincing ad he had found by a stroke of good luck and that had felt like the answer to everything at the time.

“I googled that park, it looks like a pretty cool place,” Gio comments instead of asking why he had needed to escape there.

Martino feels the beginning of a frown appear as he registers Gio’s words.

“How did you find me?” He had made sure to keep his exact location to himself, only mentioning North America and a job in nature, both of which had led to many raised eyebrows. Only two people were supposed to have his exact location and contact information and he really, really hopes that Gio didn’t go to his mother.

“Don’t underestimate how easily bribed Filo can be.”

Of course, he should probably have known better than to entrust Filippo with this kind of responsibility, he should even be glad that he had managed to hold off telling anyone for so long, but he had seemed the most likely to actually let him disappear for the summer without asking questions. Or at least, the second most likely.

Not for the first time, he wishes he had been able to go to his first choice of confidante. Unfortunately, Sana was Eva’s friend first and unlike Eleonora or Silvia, she had never tried to reach out to him after he had started avoiding everyone, although he had sometimes wished she would.

“I told him that was for emergencies only.”

“Honestly, I think he misses you a little bit,” Gio comments, his tone still light and breezy. That doesn’t last, of course. “Lots of people miss you, man.”

“I miss you guys too.”

There is a short silence during which Martino fiddles with the radio while following the falcon that is now circling around the clearing, and waits for Gio to get to what he really wants to say.

“At least, you’re not stuck in a dumb summer job like some of us. Yours must come with a pretty fucking cool view. How’s it going so far?”

“It’s good. It’s very… quiet.” Martino winces at his own poor choice of word and sure enough, Gio picks up on it.

“Quiet? There are quiet places in Europe, you know.” Behind the teasing, the hurt and incomprehension that he knows he deserves start to surface.

“I’m working on my English,” he replies hastily, a well-worn argument he had used on both his parents. He’s certainly acquired a lot of fire-protocol-related vocabulary while leafing through his binder and the various manuals about procedures as well as some pretty solid basics of bird behavior, courtesy of _Birds of Wyoming_. His spoken English, though, has possibly only gotten worse.

Gio hums noncommittally, but it’s clear that he doesn’t believe him.

“I guess you probably needed that quiet. Nobody’s heard from you in two months. Like, at all.”

“There’s no reception here, Gio.”

“Yeah, that’s what Filo said.”

“It’s true. I’m talking to you on a walkie-talkie basically.”

“Oh, I thought your phone might be full of dust or you dropped it into a pond and that’s why it sounded like that.”

The silence that follows is not as tense after the poor attempt at a deflection, but Martino keeps scratching at the railing with his nail, waiting for Gio to get to the point he’s anxiously expecting.

“Was it because of college?”

Martino’s relieved that Gio decided to choose that as his first question because he’s certainly not ready to talk about New Year’s yet. College, for all that it’s a clusterfuck that he has no idea how to get out of, sounds much easier in comparison.

“Yes, partly.”

“Marti, if you hate it so much, what are you doing there?”

At least, it was easy until Gio got exactly to the crux of the issue.

“What else was I going to do?”

“Literally anything that doesn’t make you want to fuck off to another continent after only two years. I thought you were supposed to do that gap year with Elia after high school.”

The problem is that first, how was he supposed to know that he would turn out to hate economics with a passion when he had signed up right before the deadline? Second, it’s hard to explain that it had made his dad so happy to see his son follow into his footsteps at a time when he was starting to become more and more absent. Of course, that had been before Martino found out that during these absences, he had already started replacing him with somebody else’s eight-year-old son.

“I don’t know, Gio. My dad got so excited, I thought maybe I’d like it, it didn’t sound that bad.”

“Actually, everything about the idea of studying economics sounds bad, but why did you stick around for two years, then?”

“I didn’t think it was going to get worse.” Perhaps his logic had been flawed, but he had figured that it must be normal not to retain much during his first year and that, surely, as he started to grasp the concepts, he would end up, if not liking it, then at least getting used to it. And it had seemed like such a hassle to give up after a year when he still had no idea what else he could be doing with his time. So, he had gone into his second year, still only grasping enough to barely pass his exams and now, two years out of high school, the perspective of falling by the wayside while people moved on and grew seemed even more daunting.

“And what, you’re just going to go back in September and do it again?”

“Fuck no,” Martino spits out before he can actually think about it. Gio laughs at the vehemence in his tone, a real, hearty laugh, and it feels like a step in the right direction.

“Yeah, I think you got your answer there, Marti.”

Martino had not realized he had made a decision about it, but it’s true, he can’t do it again and he won’t make himself go through the motions, sit in those classrooms and do those readings, not if he wants to make it out with his sanity intact.

“I still don’t know what else to do, though.”

“You got one month left to figure it out. And I can put in a good word for you with my boss,” Gio adds mischievously, probably anticipating Martino’s answer.

“No way, I’d rather do one more year of econ than spend my days washing up salads and peeling potatoes. How’s that going by the way?”

“It’s a lot of salads and so many fucking potatoes.”

Just like that, it feels normal again. Gio launches into stories about his job as a kitchen aid in the resort where he ends up every summer because he can’t be bothered to look for anything else when he can keep this one and be housed, fed and have access to the beach for the entire summer. The stories have been the same for three years, but it couldn’t matter less, and soon they’re both wheezing with laughter despite the time zones and the physical and emotional distance that Martino put between them 7 months ago.

But of course, it can’t last for very long and Gio soon cuts himself off halfway through a story about a barbecue disrupted by unseasonably strong winds with a long yawn that he doesn't seem to be able to hold back.

“Sorry, Marti, it's getting late and I have to be in at 9 tomorrow.” Outside, the sun, although lower over the tree line than it had been when he had picked up the radio, is still shining brightly, further highlighting the time difference, and all those other differences, between him and Gio.

“Can’t let those salads go unwashed.”

“Fuck you, man, and pay attention to the trees. When are you coming back?” The tone of the question is casual, but it’s trying so hard to be that Martino’s mood suddenly plummets as he worries what else Gio might have to say before he goes.

“End of August. The 30th.”

“Cool. Don’t be a stranger when you get back, okay? Just because you’ve travelled a bit doesn’t mean you’re suddenly too good for us. We can’t have our housewarming party without you.”

The thought of the housewarming, of the flat Gio and Eva are going to share come September, is an abrupt reminder that, although their attempts at normalcy had seemed successful, they can’t fully be until some things are aired out. Now is not the time for it and they should at the very least be on the same continent when they do, but Martino can’t not say anything.

“How’s Eva?” He doesn’t even try to transition smoothly into the topic, because Gio’s about to go and he might not bring it up if he thinks Martino is not ready to talk about it. Martino definitely isn’t, but he’s running out of options.

“Eva’s… You have to give her some time, Marti. And, dude...” Gio sighs and it’s hard to tell what it could mean through the poor quality of the radio. “You can’t keep doing that shit to her.”

Martino’s stomach tightens and he nods, something he does much too often when he’s talking to Nico, that is more of an encouragement to himself than an answer to someone who can’t see him.

“I know.” There really isn’t a way to appropriately convey how much he means the words across the poor connection. All he can do is hope that Gio believes him. “What about you?”

“Mostly, I’m still trying to figure out what you’re doing across an ocean right now. I know you hate econ and that things were a bit fucked this year, but did you really need to go that far?”

Abandoning the railing, Martino takes a few aimless steps as he figures out what to answer. They lead him to the stairs and he goes down a few steps, where he can look at the stag grazing right at the edge of the clearing. When he gets back, he’ll have to tell Gio about how he unwittingly tamed a deer, he’ll like that story. He realizes as the thought forms that it’s the first time in a while that he hasn’t felt paralyzed at the idea of telling Gio anything. 

“I’ll tell you the whole thing when I get back,” he promises, and although his stomach still twists in anxiety at the prospect, he knows he will.

“Really? You won’t start avoiding us again?”

“I promise.”

There is another sigh, but in this one, even through a shitty radio, the relief is clear.

“Okay. I miss you, Marti.”

Martino swallows with difficulty and clears his throat. Now that the door’s open, there’s one more thing he should have said a long time ago, before he left for the summer, if not months before that.

“Hey, Gio. I’m sorry about New Year’s.”

“I know you are.” The response is immediate and solid, trustworthy, like Gio himself.

But now the line is silent again and now that he’s said it, he doesn’t know how to keep going. He considers asking Gio to pass on the same message to Eva, but at the very least, she should hear from him first. When he’s home, he’ll make things right, and do it properly this time. 

“Listen,” Gio cuts through his considerations, “I have to go, I'm dead on my feet. I’ll talk to you later, so you have fun and you save those trees, right, Marti?”

Martino lets out a short laugh.

“I will. You peel those potatoes, right, Gio?”

“You know I will. Oh, and Marti?”

“Yeah?”

“I know there’s no reception where you are, but call your mom once you get a chance, okay?”

“I…” Martino begins. He’s not sure he can outright lie to Gio after that but if he brought it up, he must have had a reason and the image of his mother spending the summer alone in their empty apartment brings out the old familiar guilt. “I’ll try.” It’s the best he can promise and Gio must understand because he doesn’t insist.

“It was good talking to you, man. Bye!” He throws out the last word in English but without any pretend accent this time. There’s no real way to tell, but Martino knows he’s gone, so he doesn’t reply. He puts the radio down by his feet and leans back, resting his elbows on the step behind him. Down in the clearing, the stag looks up in his direction for a moment before leaning down again with what looks almost like a nod to Martino.

It takes a few minutes of mindlessly staring into space, mulling over the conversation for Martino to realize that by this time, on any other day, Nico would be talking his ear off about all the trees he saw on his hikes or the properties of whatever enzyme he’s been reading about. Of course today, Nico is probably giving him space and waiting for him to reach out when he’s done talking to Gio. With a brief pang of anxiety, Martino wonders how the whole connection actually works and if, since Nico had been the one to put Gio’s call through to him, he might have had a front seat to everything they’ve just said. Throughout the summer, Martino’s mentioned college, his parents’ divorce and that he hasn’t really been speaking to his friends, but he’s never told him the whole story despite having plenty of occasions to spill everything out. He hasn’t been willing to examine why, but deep down he suspects that he doesn’t want Nico to know about this side of him.

With a slightly shaky hand, Martino picks up the radio again.

“Nico?” He waits for a moment. They don’t always have the radio on hand when either of them reaches out, but it’s never very far either. So, when it’s going on a minute and he receives no reply, he tries again. “Nico? Did you hear any of this?”

The line stays silent. He’s not quite sure if it’s a good or a bad thing.


	10. Day 64

The lightning bolt seems to strike right in the center of the very aptly named Thunder Canyon and Martino almost expects to see rocks flying or flames springing out above the high walls of the canyon. It is followed by the crack of thunder which rumbles around the wooden tower so loudly it almost feels like he could touch it. Sitting on his bed, his book now resting upside down on the sheets, Martino hugs his knees and glances up towards the dark clouds. 

“Marti? Everything okay? It looks like that storm could be right over you.”

Without taking his eyes away from the window for fear of missing the next one, Martino picks up the radio he kept close enough in case a tree actually burst into flame. He's pretty sure he’s seen YouTube videos of it happening, so it’s got to be possible.

“Yes, it is. It looks amazing.”

He’s so busy staring, he doesn’t notice that it takes a moment for Nico to reply until he hears pure disbelief pour from the radio. “Really?”

“Yes, I love thunderstorms.”

“Oh, my God, why?”

The sheer incredulity in the question finally manages to take his attention away from the weather and he laughs.

“I don’t know. They’re very dramatic and unpredictable. It kinda makes you feel insignificant.” Now that he has to put them into words, he is suddenly unsure of his arguments. He’s never really given much thought as to the why, he just knows he loves thunderstorms, always has, probably always will. His mom never misses an opportunity to show off her collection of pictures of him with his nose pressed against the window when he was still young enough that he might have been expected to be afraid of them.

“And that’s a good thing?” It is very clear that Martino is not managing to properly convey his love of thunderstorms because Nico only sounds more and more baffled with each new response.

“I have no idea. I like watching them and the way they make me feel. You never really know when the next lightning bolt is going to fall, where, what it’s going to look like…”

“If you’re gonna get struck and die,” Nico continues in a teasing imitation of his tone.

“Oh, that’s not gonna happen. This is fucking amazing, but there’s no way I’m getting out of this tower right now.”

As if to underline his point, lightning strikes again, this time to the south, probably somewhere over Ruby River.

“What if the next lightning bolt hits a tree and it catches fire? Aren’t you gonna do your job?” Nico’s tone has switched back to his usual amusement and there’s something of a challenge in it as well.

“My job is to radio you and you deal with it.”

Another crack of thunder resonates just above him, loud and powerful, and Martino startles before leaning through the open window to look at the sky above him. It reminds him of one of his earliest memories, when he was around 3 or 4 years old and he had refused to go to bed in favor of running from one window to the next through his parents’ apartment to try and catch every second of the show. He’s pretty sure his mother has a video of it somewhere because he can picture the scene way too clearly, as if he remembered watching himself rather than the experience itself.

Seeing how excited he had been, his mother had given up on getting him in bed after about 10 minutes, and he remembers the sound of laughter on the tape, free and joyful laughter at her son’s stubbornness. He doesn’t remember when was the last time he heard her laugh like that outside of one of those videotapes.

At the thought, some of his enjoyment of the storms tapers off and Gio’s words from the previous day cross his mind again, as they have done a few times since their conversation ended. Martino’s been considering taking his advice and reaching out to his mother, but he doesn’t know how.

He doesn’t want to talk to her directly and have to listen as she wonders what she did to send him so far away, and he especially doesn’t want to have to explain anything, that he can’t stand the tension in the flat created by the boxes still taking up space in their hallway, or that if he has to sit through one more lecture on game theory, he’s going to lose his mind. He can’t even begin to touch the whole Gio thing. The most prideful part of him, already to blame for much, also doesn’t relish the prospect of having to ask Nico if he can call his mom for him.

Fortunately, as he woke up this morning to the rumbling of thunder in the distance, he figured out that there may be another way. Nico has been quiet for the past minute or so, having apparently admitted defeat, so it’s easy enough to pick up an entirely new topic.

“Hey, Nico? Would there be a way for me to send a letter?”

They’ve done this often enough, abandoning and picking up subjects without explanations or segues that Nico only takes a second to think through his answer.

“Depends. Is it urgent? I can have the office call someone for you if you want.”

“No, no, it’s not that urgent. I just… wanted to send a letter.”

There is a pensive huff of air through the radio so Martino lets Nico ponder the quandary he’s just dropped in his lap.

“There’s a mailbox on the main parking lot, but you’d have to hike all the way back and you’ve got to stay in your sector.” Martino nods along, keeping quiet as Nico seems to be mostly thinking out loud for now. “Unless… I guess Willie could do it if I ask him nicely.”

“Who’s Willie?” The name’s never come up before but for some reason, there is a sharp edge to his words at hearing about the existence of this guy who might be swayed by Nico asking nicely.

“He’s the one who brings the food packages so you don’t starve,” Nico teases in answer. “If you don’t mind waiting until next week, you could leave your letter at the supply drop and he could mail it.”

“But I don’t have an envelope. Or a stamp.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. He owes me a favor from 2 years ago, he can pay for a stamp.”

“Two years ago?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember everything, Marti.”

Briefly, Martino wonders what Nico may remember from their very first conversation, from that first night when he had been too tired not for politeness. He wonders if Nico would remember arranging for him to post a letter in two years. He pushes the thought away, two years is a long time and who even knows where either of them will be by then.

“Shit, remind me not to piss you off,” he replies instead.

“No, not like that,” Nico laughs. “I prefer to only remember the good.”

“I’ll have to make it really good so you’ll remember me, then.”

“Of course, I’ll remember you,” Nico replies immediately.

Silence falls, only troubled by the thunder rumbling in the distance. Martino leans against the windowsill, hearing the first few drops of rain falling over the leaves, noticing the way his heartbeat just picked up. 

“Looks like that storm is moving away from you,” Nico comments quietly with something in his tone Martino can’t place.

“Yeah, it’s not as loud anymore. It’s raining a little bit.”

“No burning trees to put out, then?”

“No, I think we’re good.”

The thunder continues to rumble more and more quietly, and Martino looks up to see blue sky reappearing behind the parting clouds, already chasing the drizzle away. He wants to say something, ask about what they’ll remember in two years, but he’s known Nico for two months, they haven’t even met in person and he doesn’t know how to start a conversation like that.

“Hey, Marti,” Nico begins in a softer voice, as if he had been thinking along the same lines and something twists within Martino’s chest. But then, the only thing that follows is a string of expletives mixing English and Italian, and Martino’s pretty sure he’s thrown some Spanish in there as well. “Can you give me a sec? I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” Martino says to the empty tower, not even sure that Nico isn’t already talking to someone else. To try and not dwell on his disappointment at the untimely interruption, he stands up and takes a turn around the room, following the course of the clouds in the sky as the wind carries them off to the south.

He wonders idly how deer feel about thunderstorms.

Now that the weather has cleared up, he’s starting to feel cooped up and pulls on his shoes to go for his usual hike. He had his sights set on a pond he’s only been to once before and figures he can take advantage of Nico being kept busy by his responsibilities for however long to get some air and clear his head. At least, they can always pick up where they left off wherever Martino is, and he really hopes they do.

By the time he’s reached the pond, nothing’s been picked up but a brief call from Nico who had to go take care of something and offers an apology as well as a promise to talk later.

So, Martino’s enjoying the less muggy atmosphere, watching a frog sunbathing at the edge of the water while imagining what Nico might have been about to say before he was interrupted and pondering why it had mattered so much that Nico was certain that he would remember him in two years. As he stares at the frog sitting on its rock, Martino realizes that what had been a given from the start, that he and Nico were never meant to meet, that they were just two voices happening to connect during a job, had started to weigh on the prospect of the three weeks still stretching ahead of them.

The frog seems to get tired of having its privacy invaded and decides to jump into the water. Martino makes a face at the rock where it had been sitting and turns around to follow the flight of a bird that seems to be trying to impress one of its peers judging by its unnecessary loops and somersaults. Martino wishes things were that simple to figure out for human beings as well.

Suddenly, at a noise he can’t identify, the bird interrupts itself mid-loop to fly away and disappear in a blink. For a second, silence falls around the pond and Martino wonders if he and the bird may have imagined it.

But then the noise comes again and Martino’s head snaps towards the opposite side of the pond. This time, he’s certain of it, it’s a voice he’s hearing.

“Marti!”

And it’s screaming his name.

Squinting against the sun now shining bright and wishing he was high-ranking enough to have been issued binoculars, Martino starts scanning the other shore. Then, he finds the source of the noise, almost all the way across the water, waving both arms in the air.

“Marti!”

Martino raises a hesitant hand as well.

“Nico?” He calls out, and the figure drops his arms down.

“Hey, I found you!” The words carry easily across the water and Martino feels a smile grow on his face.

“I guess you win,” he shouts back.

Turning around, he starts studying the bushes around him. As far as he knows, there is no trail going all around the lake, but there is one somewhere that should lead him to where Nico is standing. He stares at the bushes to find the breach that would indicate a safe place to pass through. Silence has fallen back down over the area, and when Martino’s eyes go back to the other shore, he can only see rocks.

“Ni?” Martino calls out. The only answer he gets is a flock of warblers flying off from a nearby tree that have probably grown tired of all the ruckus. Forgetting about the trail, he steps as close to the edge of the pond as he dares without risking falling in and stretches out his neck to scan the opposite shore but doesn’t find anybody there. He tries again.

“Ni?”


	11. Day 65

“Morning, Marti,” the familiar voice greets him, as cheerful as usual, from where the radio is resting by the sink. Martino doesn’t move and lets his eyes trail along the trees that seem to dip down towards Thunder Canyon. “Marti? Hey, Marti? Where are you?” From there, his gaze follows the line of the canyon until it disappears out of view. Moving north, he takes in the mountains, the ones that lead up to the supply drop where he gets his food packages delivered every other week and then, even further, hours from where he stands, towards Thorofare lookout. As the thought forms, Martino steps away from the window and faces the east. “Marti, you’re supposed to be up by now. What if there’s a fire?” The voice doesn’t relent, but Martino continues his observation of the horizon. He’s a lookout after all, so that’s what he’s going to do: look out. “Martino?” Nico’s enthusiasm is waning and there is something close to concern in his voice now. Martino’s eyes stop over a pine standing taller than all the other trees, studying its shape and the way it seems to reach up towards the sky. “Marti, Daisy is not that far from you, if you don’t answer, I’m going to send her to check in on you.”

In a few short steps, Martino closes the short distance to the kitchen counter.

“Good morning.”

“Finally! I should have resorted to threats earlier. Were you sleeping in?”

“No, I’m up,” Martino replies shortly, directing his eyes to the south, taking in the vast expanse of forest that seems to stretch endlessly.

“Okay.” The radio crackles for about two seconds before Nico speaks again. “Actually, I need a favor. There might be an issue with a power line that’s north of your lookout. Some people have been cut off. Could you go and check it out?”

“Sure. Where is it?”

“You know that cave down in Thunder Canyon? You have to take the trail that heads north from there and keep going towards Beartooth Point. You’ll find the line easily and it shouldn't be too hard to see if anything’s up with it.”

Martino’s curt replies seem to have gotten through to Nico who’s adopted a carefully neutral and professional tone instead of his usual teasing. On another day, Martino might have plied him with questions to figure out what was wrong. Today, he simply starts filling his water bottle before slipping it inside his backpack.

“Fine, I’m going. Anything else?” While Martino puts down the radio, long enough to shoulder his backpack, the radio crackles uselessly again.

“No, thank you. Let me know what you find. And if you need anything on the way, I’ll be here.”

Opening the door to step outside, Martino can’t hold back a scoff. “Will you?”

Nico doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t wait for him to, instead heading down the stairs in a huff.

The hike is unbearable. He’s been walking for less than 20 minutes, if he turned around, he could still see his lookout towering behind him, and his attention keeps wandering, making him stumble and slip on the gravel. The normally easy path now seems treacherous and exhausting.

Before he started this job, hiking had never been one of Martino’s strong suits, he had not lied about that. After a week or two, he had accepted it as a necessity since he could not rely on buses or bikes to take him anywhere, just on his feet and the yellow dust of the Shoshone. But then, he had found himself enjoying it more and more with each passing day. It helped that everywhere he looked, the scenery was breathtaking, the trees and plants would be glowing in all kinds of shades of green despite the drought, and he would catch glimpses of the wildlife teeming all over the park, even if he usually only ever caught them as they were running away from him.

It also helped that only a few days in, Nico had been with him everywhere he went, talking his ear off about the park, this or that species of trees, college, Italy, art, non-dehydrated food as if no thought that came to either of them was too insignificant to share.

Today, even if he’s hiked for much longer and on much worse terrain by now, the journey to his destination seems excruciatingly long and boring. With each step he takes, the clump of guilt in his chest for not letting Nico keep him company on the way like he usually does only grows. The flatness which had replaced the usual ever-enthusiastic tones of Nico’s voice still seems to ring out in his ears in time with his feet planting on the ground.

After the worst night’s sleep he’s had since he stepped foot in his cabin on a warm night in early June, after tossing and turning as his disappointment at Nico's disappearance the previous day turned to annoyance then turned to resentment, it is obvious that missing Nico is much stronger than anything else. Of course, he can only blame himself for it and left alone with his thoughts, he gladly berates the part of his brain that likes to hold grudges, to keep them in its claws and go over them over and over again, to tend and nurture them until they turn sour and inevitably end up ruining everything.

By the time he finds the power line, after about 40 minutes of heavy silence, he’s managed to shake off some of his surliness and decided that it would be too stupid to insist on not talking to Nico when it’s been the best part of his days. He finds the radio in his pocket and is about to press the button when he notices it.

The power line, which had been up to now hanging regularly between wooden poles, seems to be dipping just as it vanishes from his sight, hidden by an escarpment. He puts the radio back in his pocket and gets off the path to follow the line. No matter how much he wants to fix what he broke, he’s got a job to do first, a job that Nico entrusted to him, and he’s going to do it before he can think of making amends.

The terrain has become steeper and the narrow trail is flanked by heavy bushes, but he’s found renewed energy to climb it. At a much quicker pace than when he had set off earlier, dragging his feet and his guilty conscience, Martino reaches the top of the slope and finds the source of the problem.

“Ni? Are you there?”

The answer comes immediately. “Is everything okay?”

“A tree fell on the line, it’s disconnected. Maybe the thunderstorm from yesterday knocked it out.”

“Oh, you found it, that’s amazing. Where are you exactly?” Martino looks around and tries to describe the trail he followed in as much detail as he can until Nico hums understandingly. “I see where it is. Hang on, just give me a minute, I’ll call it in. But don’t go anywhere, okay?”

At his insistence, Martino feels a last stab of guilt at having ignored Nico for so long.

“I’m going to check out the area to see if there might be more damage, but I’ll wait for your call.”

“You will?”

“I will.”

A sound comes through the radio, like a gust of wind blowing over it. Or like someone letting out a relieved exhale, Martino can’t help but think.

“Thanks, Marti. And thank you for checking out the line.”

“Of course.”

Martino contemplates the way he’s just come for a moment, until he realizes that he doesn’t feel like heading back so soon. He’s left alone with his thoughts again but a weight has been lifted off his shoulders now that he’s stopped pretending he doesn’t want Nico’s company. He’s come so far that it seems like a waste not to have a look at where this trail is leading. He’s been following the power line for 10 minutes at most when Nico calls back.

“Marti,” he announces himself, instead of launching directly into whatever he has to say as he usually does.

“Hey, how did it go?”

“Good, they’re sending someone to fix it right away.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine being cut off from all communications out here. That must be really lonely.” After finding himself standing alone at the edge of the pond, he had cut himself off from his one link to the world and had then immediately fallen back in the old patterns he had been trying to run away from. 

“I wanted to tell you, I’m sorry about yesterday…” Nico begins as if he could read his thoughts, and Martino cuts him off immediately.

“Ni, don’t worry about it.”

“Marti, listen,” Nico retorts. “The lookout from Moss Peak had a bad fall. They called me just when I saw you, I had to help them out.”

The explanation only makes matters worse. Not only had Martino been sulking like a child who arrives too late in line to meet Santa, but someone had actually been hurt while he imagined himself the victim.

“Shit, are they okay?”

“They broke their leg, they had to be evacuated out to the hospital, but they’re going to be fine. We’re just going to be down one lookout until the end of the season.” He sounds tired and dispirited at the admission. Martino wonders if he might have wanted to unburden himself earlier of the pressure weighing on him, only to realize Martino was ignoring him and soaking in his own imaginary slight.

“That sucks, I’m sorry,” is all he can offer.

He continues walking in silence until he finds a wider path which he chooses to follow to the east, further away from all the areas he’s had time to explore over the summer.

“I’m sorry too,” Nico offers after almost a minute of quiet. “I wanted to stay.”

The words hang in the quiet air while Martino clutches his radio, grateful that his sentiment is being returned.

“I wanted you to stay too.”

Martino’s thumb strokes the button as he considers pressing it again, but never quite making himself do it.

“But next time, eh, Marti?” There’s laughter in Nico’s voice but it doesn’t ring as full as it usually does. Martino doesn’t stop to think about the fact that he can tell despite the mediocre audio quality.

“I’ll hold you to that,” he replies without much conviction, feeling like neither of them needs to point out that there’s probably not going to be a next time.

As the path takes him further east, they move past the things that are not worth dwelling on as Nico keeps Martino entertained with the - slow - progress of his thesis. He doesn’t understand most of what it’s about but it’s better than the silent hiking he had had to endure earlier.

When Nico excuses himself to hear back from the power company, Martino’s now trained eyes catch two young trees whose lower branches tangled together to form a natural arch over what looks like the entrance to another trail. He bends over to fit under the branches and finds himself in front of the steepest slope he’s encountered all day. He considers turning around but he can see the light coming through the trees at the top so it mustn’t be very long and according to his map, he should be right at the edge of a cliff overlooking a valley. It seems like the kind of view it would be a shame to pass on, so he takes a deep breath and wills his aching thighs not to betray him now. He’s panting by the time he gets to the top and he shuffles in place to stretch out his legs but as soon as his eyes fall on the view, any thought that the exertion was not worth it vanishes.

The valley stretches out below him, and on the other side, he recognizes the soft slopes of Moss Peak which progressively merge into a plain to the south. A flurry of movement around a watering hole down in front of him draws his attention to a group of animals frolicking in and around the water. Although he’s too high above the valley to distinguish what species they are, he wonders with a small smile if his deer neighbors might have some relatives living in the area.

He’s scanning the horizon when a voice at the back of his head tells him that something is wrong with the picture in front of him. A slight frown appears on his face and he starts going over the landscape again, more slowly, the way he’s learned to scan his surroundings when in his lookout to find the anomaly in what has become familiar. He’s staring at the mountains to the northeast when it clicks. Above the forest on the other side of the valley, the color of the sky is all wrong for this time of day. Martino’s heartbeat picks up anxiously as he approaches the edge of the cliff to lean over and squint as best as he can from where he is. A gust of wind makes the trees’ foliage move in the distance, revealing what he already suspected and leaving him with no doubt whatsoever about what he’s seeing.

It’s a fire.


	12. Day 70

The fire just… keeps burning. It’s been days and although Martino knows that people have been informed, that measures have been taken, the result is still the same: the fire rages on. Since the first time he caught sight of the flames engulfing unfortunate trees, it’s moved eastwards to the point where Martino can now see it from up in his tower, where he remains safe enough for now but powerless.

“There’s really nothing we can do?” Martino asks, resting his arm on the railing, unable to take his eyes away from the dark band over the horizon.

“Unfortunately, no,” Nico replies indulgently. It’s not the first time he’s been asked a version of this question in the past four days. ”That’s out of our hands.”

“But the whole point of being here was to look out for fires.”

“And you did, and now the right people are handling it.” Nico’s tone sounds almost sorry, but Martino doesn’t need anyone to feel sorry for him, he’s not the one whose habitat is being destroyed before his very eyes.

When he took the job, about four months ago, he had read the ad carefully and googled what fire lookouts did exactly, then he had read the binder and the pamphlets and asked Nico about procedures, but somehow in all of that, he had never paused to imagine what would happen if there actually was a fire. The answer is not much, at least not on his end.

All he has been able to do for the past two days is stare at the horizon and at the helicopters that have started going back and forth towards the site to assess the situation.

The landscape he’s gotten so used to has become unfamiliar, with a cloud of smoke hanging in the distance, the sky glowing in almost apocalyptic-looking orange and grey hues, and although he’s probably way too far, he could swear the air he breathes smells of ash. It feels like having a first-row seat to the end of the world.

He’s not sure how long he’s been staring, his fingers clinging tightly to the radio, but it’s long enough that when he moves his eyes to the bucket resting at the top of the stairs, he has to blink a few times to focus on it. At the same moment, Nico calls out his name.

“Marti. Marti, don’t go there, there’s nothing you can do, okay?”

Martino glances back towards the fire, feeling as if he had just been caught red-handed while he was assessing his chances against a wildfire. But of course, he knows perfectly well that he could not put out a fire all by himself with a bucket.

“Marti?” Nico insists. “It’s way too big, it’d be pointless.”

“I know,” he retorts, heading back into the cabin to try and find something else to look at, something peaceful and that does not make him feel completely useless. Except there is not much to do inside either. On another day, he would take his usual position scanning his surroundings, but he doesn’t need the reminder of what’s happening out there. Another option would be to go hiking, but it doesn’t feel right to be traipsing through the forest while some of it is going up in flames. He pulls the chair at the desk and sits down, resting his chin on one hand. What he needs is a distraction.

“Did you ever finish that drawing?”

“I’m a little stuck on it, actually,” Nico replies after only the briefest pause to process the question.

“You haven’t even seen the model, that might be why.”

“The model’s secondary,” Nico shoots back a little too gleefully for Martino to let the statement slide.

“Fuck off, how can the model be secondary if that’s who you’re drawing?”

“There’s a lot more stuff to figure out to make it work, I’ll have you know.” Nico’s response is a little smug and Martino jumps at the chance to steer well away from any discussions of fires.

“Oh, yeah. And are you figuring it out?”

There are a few seconds of silence and Martino spends them examining the patterns in the wood grain of his desk.

“I think so. It’s getting there.” His tone makes Martino look up for its sudden lack of any teasing. Nico sounds almost thoughtful, and although he’s not sure why, something tightens in Martino's throat.

“So, that’s good, then?” He asks cautiously.

“Yes, I think it’s good.”

At least, it’s working, Martino is now distracted.

The problem is that once again, things implied seem to threaten to be added to the pile of topics they don’t talk about. Things like Nico calling him in the middle of the night, like whether or not he heard anything from his conversation with Gio, like the fact that they got so close to meeting and that they’re now back in their respective towers, none of which is ever brought up.

Or like what happens when the summer is over and Martino flies back to Rome while Nico stays here and they have to leave their radios behind. Are they supposed to just go back to not being side by side and sharing their every thought? How is Martino supposed to get his life back on track, figure out college, deal with his parents, apologize to his friends without Nico being just a press of the button away?

“Actually, there’s another thing I need to know for that drawing. It’s really important, so think it through.” Suddenly pulled from his thoughts by the serious tone of the question, Martino sits up, his heartbeat picking up as he waits. “What are your thoughts on giraffes?”

Surprised laughter escapes him, but he doesn’t have time to shoot back a joke in answer. “Don’t laugh,” Nico scolds fake-sternly even if Martino can hear him trying to remain serious. “It could be the difference between a failure and a masterpiece.”

“Why would giraffes make any difference?”

“I told you Marti.” The smile is now fully back in Nico's voice. “Trust the process.”

Against the dark sky of the evening, the smoke is barely visible anymore, but the glowing embers of the fire seem to slice the sky in two. The sun has long set but the night still feels oppressively hot, almost hotter than the day had been, and Martino wonders if it would be possible for the fire to heat the air throughout the entire park.

He’s lying on his back at the foot of his towner in just the pair of shorts he usually sleeps in. The radio has barely left his hand all day, and despite working in fire safety during an actual fire, Nico hasn’t been gone for longer than 20 minutes all day. Every time Martino has picked up the radio, he’s been right there to answer.

“When do you sleep?” Martino asks, following his own train of thoughts.

“What?” Comes the understandingly confused answer.

“If you’re talking to all the others as much as you talk to me, when do you ever sleep?”

“Who says I talk to the other lookouts as much?” Nico answers with no hesitation, unlike Martino who pauses at the statement.

“So, it’s just me?”

“Don’t tell the others, Marti”, Nico replies in a lower voice, not quite a whisper, but as if in confidence, "but you’re my favorite.”

The warmth that spreads through Martino’s chest has nothing to do with the heat of the night this time.

“‘Cause I’m Italian?”

There is a brief huff through the radio before Nico speaks. “Sure, ‘cause you’re Italian.”

When he doesn’t follow up, Martino places the radio back on his chest, close enough to pick up, and goes back to watching the stars above him and trying to identify the constellations he’s seen in passing but never paid that much attention to.

“You wanna know another secret?”

The way he’s whispered the words into the radio makes Martino scramble to grab the radio, undefined anticipation jolting through his veins.

“Sure.”

He can hear Nico moving through the crackle of the radio, presumably shifting position in his bed, where he’s mentioned he was lying down. Despite not being much more than noise though the poor connection, the movements sound oddly intimate, reminiscent of waking up in the middle of the night to Nico calling out his name.

“There’s a stream, about a kilometer below my lookout. Every year, on my first day, I put a bottle of tequila down there. And then, when it gets so fucking hot that I wish I could peel off my skin, I pick it up and have a little party with myself.”

“Let me guess, you got that tequila now?”

“Cheers, Marti,” Nico replies in English with an exaggerated drawl.

Martino has long lost any sense of how long he and Nico have been talking and what time it could possibly be. At some point, the helicopters stopped coming and going as frequently, but every once in a while, one will still fly over the park to check on the progress of the fire.

In the relative quiet and with the sky as his only view, Martino may not have any tequila to help him relax, but he still feels looser and closer to peaceful than he’s felt in a really long time.

“I wish you could see how that fire looks from up here.” Now that he knows, Martino is convinced he can hear the alcohol in Nico’s voice, the way it’s gone down in pitch and volume and the almost dreamy way he speaks.

“You want me to hike for five hours at night and in this heat to watch a fire?”

“Of course not. But wouldn’t it be nice, if you could be up here now?”

“It would. I bet you’ve got an awesome view.”

“Hm,” Nico agrees, although not quite convincingly. “But there’s more to do here than look at the view.”

Martino tries to answer but the words catch in his throat. A few strangled syllables is all he can manage. “Is there?"

“Yes, there’s so much we could do if you were up here.”

It isn’t hard to decipher the implications laced through Nico’s hushed tones, and Martino grips the radio tightly until the plastic edge is digging into his palm for a moment, a heavy, almost palpable pause, while he ponders his answer. 

There is no way to know how much tequila Nico’s had and Martino is all too familiar with drunken mistakes to think responding in kind is anything but an overall bad idea.

He’s already running from the consequences of too many bad ideas, he doesn’t want to have to hide from the best thing that has happened to him all year for the 20 days he still has to spend here. Not when he depends as much as he does on having Nico’s company as he goes about his day and especially not after having had a taste, albeit self-inflicted, of what it was like to do this job without him.

“We could share that tequila,” he offers instead.

“Yeah.” If Nico is disappointed at the tepid answer, it’s impossible to tell. “If you come back next year, you’ll have to remember the tequila.” At the mention of next year, some of Martino’s courage falters and he drops the hand that’s holding the radio to the ground and stretches out his arm at his side. “Do you think you might come back?”

There is no doubt which answer Nico is hoping to receive even though his tone is not pressing, just quietly questioning.

Worse than the fire or the heat, the question is much too weighted, so Martino stares at what he can see of the edge of the forest in front of him. In between the tree trunks, he thinks he finds a pair of brown eyes looking back at him, but he’s pretty sure he’s just imagining it. It’s too dark to really see and although he hasn’t left the clearing, the day has left him bone tired.

He doesn’t have an answer as to whether or not he might come back. A part of him wants to, but the more rational side of his mind wants more than a means of escape. He wants Nico to come back to Rome with him, but he doesn’t want either of them to sacrifice the lives they already have. More than anything, he doesn’t want the summer to end. He has no idea what he wants.

Except that’s not entirely true. There’s one thing he knows that he wants, and in that instant, more than anything else, he wants Nico desperately and hopelessly, but by some kind of cruel twist of fate, the people Martino wants seem destined to always remain just out of reach.

“I really don’t know, Ni.”

There is more rustling from Nico’s end of the conversation and Martino sits up, wrapping his arms around his knees in an attempt to bring himself some comfort. In front of him, the forest is still and there are no curious eyes in sight.

“Can you see the stars, Marti?” Dragging his eyes back towards the sky, Martino is glad for the change of subject. After all, what point is there to rehashing a problem with no solution?

“Yeah, I see them. You were right, they’re really beautiful.”

“They never looked like that in Rome, did they?”

“No.” Martino shakes his head pointlessly. “They never did.”

“At least I got to show them to you once.”

“That doesn’t count. That’s not showing them to me. You’re not there.” The retort comes without thinking and overly bitter for what the night had been up until then, full of hushed confidences to forget about the disaster happening not so far from them.

“I know.” At this point, Nico just sounds dejected and Martino hates that this is what they’ve come to.

“Maybe some other time, you’ll get to show me,” he offers, hoping to steer the mood back to something lighter, back to their usual teasing and chitchat, not to the weight of their reality.

“You bet.”

“The stars and the drawing”, Martino adds. “If you ever finish it.”

“You keep doubting me, but that depends on you as well.”

“How?”

“Have you thought about what I asked you?”

“About the giraffes?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t.” Nico makes a disapproving noise and a smile tugs at Martino’s lips. “Tell me about the giraffes, then.”


	13. Day 77

Martino finishes hauling himself over the rock, which requires both of his hands and most of his attention. As soon as he’s back on firmer ground, though, he grabs the radio from his pocket, determined not to let Nico get away with his lies.

“Bullshit,” he announces in as peremptory a tone as he can manage while still breathing hard from the effort.

“How would you know?” Nico shoots back, having presumably been patiently waiting for him to overcome the rocky obstacles in his path.

“I know because there’s no wapitis in the US. They live in Australia or something.”

“No, they don’t. There aren’t that many in the park anymore, but I’ve seen a few around.”

Martino interrupts his climbing to take a few deep breaths before he can better dispute this argument. If he had known that the northern side of Thunder Canyon was so steep, he would have picked a better time to start this particular conversation.

“You’ve seen fucking kangaroos in Wyoming?”

It takes long enough for Nico to respond that his breathing starts to settle down and that he has time to imagine himself triumphant until Nico’s next words reach him.

“Did you mean wallabies?”

Any sense of victory he might have felt immediately shatters as he realizes that he had in fact been picturing wallabies, which means he’s not entirely sure what a wapiti could be.

“Oh. Wallabies are the kangaroos, right?”

“Yes. Wapitis are moose. So are you finally going to admit that maybe that place is called Wapiti Meadow because at one point there were actual wapitis there?”

Although Martino doesn’t particularly want to admit it, he doesn’t know enough about the North American fauna, the non-avian kind at least, to question the presence of wapitis in the meadow he’s been trying to reach for the past hour.

“Maybe,” he compromises as Nico laughs, a little bit at him but mostly at the mix-up. “But there aren't any wallabies here, so I wasn't entirely wrong."

"Oh no, you were. You were so wrong."

"And you sent me to a place that’s impossible to get to.”

“Yeah, it’s definitely easier from the north. It’s quite a climb to get there from the canyon.”

Martino finally reaches a plateau and heads in the direction of a copse of trees that should, if the past three months’ worth of map reading have been doing their work, mark the entrance to the now infamous Wapiti Meadow, which may or may not host actual wapitis. After over 10 days of staying cooped up in his tower or sticking close around it, Martino had begun to develop cabin fever. Or clearing fever. He had been feeling some kind of fever which culminated in him shouldering his backpack and announcing that he was going to find the meadow Nico had sometimes raved about. Since the fire was clearly not going anywhere, he was going to make the most out of his last ten days here.

As he goes to get around the trees, though, he finds himself faced with a metal fence towering over him and plastered with a red “Keep out” sign. It would have been impossible to spot from the narrow and craggy trail, but now he can see it stretching out on both sides, zealously guarding whatever is behind it.

“It’s fenced in?” It’s weird, he remembers distinctly Nico describing a place down by a stream flowing through Wapiti Meadow, and in none of his ravings did he allude to climbing a fence to get there. Another look at the metal wall in front of him finishes to convince Martino that no matter how pretty the place may be there is no way he would ever manage to climb that thing without causing himself some kind of injury.

“What?”

“I think I’m there, but there’s a fence blocking the way. I’m not sure how far it goes, but I can’t see the end of it.”

“A fence?” Nico repeats with bewilderment. “Wait, there were those biologists who wanted to do a study there a while ago. About bullfrogs, maybe, or pikas, or something. I didn’t know it got approved.”

Unwilling to completely waste his trip after climbing for what felt like an eternity, Martino starts following the fence to his right, where the ground seems to follow a gentler slope than on the other side.

“Is the whole meadow fenced in?”

“I have no idea. There was a memo,” Nico begins as the sound of paper shuffling comes through the radio. “Fuck, I don’t know where it went.”

As more papers rustle really loudly as if Nico had just dropped them directly over the radio, Martino breathes out a laugh. “Sounds organized.”

“We get so many memos, Marti,” is the slightly desperate reply he receives. “Seriously, hang on…”

Martino holds up the radio to make fun of him some more when instead, he comes to an abrupt stop. In front of him, having just appeared from a bend in the path hidden by the trees hanging over the fence, stands the stag, and Martino freezes, much like he had when their eyes had first met in the forest. This time, however, when Martino lowers the hand holding the radio, the stag doesn’t run, he doesn’t even flinch, simply flares his nostrils and Martino’s immediately filled with the intuition that something is wrong.

Animal behavior is not something he knows much about, except for his aunt’s cats who barely seem to require human intervention and for his newly acquired knowledge about North American birds, but the tension emanating from the stag is almost palpable. His ears are perked backwards and once he meets Martino’s eyes, he starts stomping the ground with one foot and pacing in place in an almost unsettling dance.

They’ve never been this so close to each other for this long so Martino never really got the chance to appreciate how sharp and solid his antlers look. He takes a careful step back. The deer never leaves the cover of the forest this early in the day, or at least not in his human neighbor’s sight, and he only ever stoops to picking at the food Martino drops for him sometimes after sunset. It’s stupid but finding him here, at such a distance from their clearing, Martino can’t help but think that it looks like the stag was waiting for him.

“Yeah, that memo’s gone,” Nico’s defeated voice startles both Martino and the stag who stomps his feet again and turns around, heading away at a strangely slow pace. Not sure why he does it or even if it’s a good idea, Martino decides to follow him. Now that the stag’s got his back to him, which must be a sign that he doesn’t consider him a danger and that he’s not about to attack, Martino notices the slight limp of his rear leg first, and then, higher up on this thigh, the slightly bloody red gash. Feeling more than a little out of his depth, he lifts the radio as close to his mouth as he can and whispers, “Nico.” 

“What’s wrong?” The answer comes immediately and just the sound of his own name seems to have clued Nico in that something was up because his tone betrays concern.

“The deer, he’s hurt. What do I do?”

There is a brief silence, and the stag turns around to glare at him. Martino raises his free hand in an appeasing gesture that he’s not sure the animal can actually understand.

“Bambi? What happened?”

“I don’t know. He just showed up, he’s got some kind of cut on his...” he hesitates for a moment, searching for the right word through vague memories of cartoons about anthropomorphic animals from his childhood. He gives up. “On his hip.”

“Is it bad? I could call the vet but she doesn’t usually make the trip for deer.”

“It doesn’t look that deep,” Martino begins before interrupting himself as the stag stops and he realizes what’s wrong.

The stag leans down to give small, ineffective pushes with his nose at a young fawn, who seems about the same size as the one that had been in the forest with him and who seems to have gotten caught in the fence. The fawn’s legs are folded on the ground and shivers are running through his entire body.

Now, Martino knows that he’s completely out of his depth.

He carefully deposits his backpack on the ground and holds up the radio for a second, considering whether he should ask Nico for help before deciding that he’s the only one who can do anything for the fawn right now and shoving it back into his pocket.

Hoping that he’s right in thinking that since the stag led him all the way here, he’s not going to attack if he approaches the fawn, Martino crouches next to him to get a better idea of the situation before he can decide what to do. The stag simply takes a few steps back, keeping his neck extended and close to the younger animal.

But as soon as Martino holds out a hand in his direction, the fawn starts thrashing in fear, which of course threatens to tighten the wire that’s wrapped around his ribs even further. Martino throws a helpless glance towards the stag, wishing he could just ask him to keep his kid in check, but he has no idea how to communicate that. Meanwhile in his panic, the fawn has managed to twist his rear leg in a new piece of wire that threatens to give him a scar the stag's.

Filled with a new resolution at the sight of the frightened animal, Martino decides that he may not be able to stop a fire, but he can surely free a trapped fawn. He starts uncoiling the wire around his leg since it’s the easiest thing to do for now while he’s still assessing the situation.

The bottom of the fence seems to have come undone somehow, leaving wires free to twist around anything that comes in proximity with them. The rest of the story, Martino can only surmise, but he suspects that, perhaps out of curiosity, the fawn must have stuck his head through the fence, then one of his legs through another hole. When he had struggled to untangle himself, he must have made it worse by twisting the loose wire around his trunk and his front legs. Deprived of opposable thumbs, the stag couldn’t possibly have helped.

Once he’s figured out where the end of the wire is, Martino should be able to untwist it easily enough. As gently as he can, he grabs the fawn’s head in his left hand to keep him from hurting himself and rubs his thumb lightly along its neck in the hope that the gesture calms him down once he realizes Martino means him no harm and he stops trying to kick himself free. He must be tired, though, because he stops soon enough and only continues trembling as long as Martino remains at his side.

As he lets go of the fawn to untwist the wire around the animal’s trunk, the last one before he can pull his neck and his leg free of the fence for good, Martino is vaguely aware of Nico speaking again.

“Marti, do you need the vet?”

The stag, who had been keeping out of the way up until now, sniffs suspiciously at Martino’s pocket before returning his attention to the fawn. Stifling a curse as the sharp end of the wire curls itself right into the flesh of his hand, Martino manages to untwist the last piece that was tethering the fawn. After that, he pulls his leg from its hole, then his neck and the fawn is free, standing stunned and quivering on his too long legs, between the fence and the stag.

Having taken stock of his new, detangled situation, he attempts a few stumbling steps before rushing as fast as he can manage in his state of shock to hide behind the deer’s legs. Satisfied that he doesn’t seem to have suffered too much from the ordeal, Martino picks up his pack again and leaves them alone to recover, following the fence back to the path that had led him there.

When he’s out of earshot from the two animals, his heart still beating fast from witnessing the fawn’s obvious distress, Martino picks up the radio.

“Ni, are you there?”

“Where did you go? Is Bambi okay? I called Sarah. She won’t come, but you can talk to her and she’ll tell you what to do.”

“No, it’s fine,” Martino replies, almost cutting him off. “Guess who was here with Bambi.”

The excitement of his accidental rescue mission makes the words stumble out of his mouth too quickly in his haste to tell Nico the whole story. Only sparing a glance to the top of the trail he climbed from the canyon, Martino continues following the fence, not paying that much attention to his surroundings, as he recounts the minute details to Nico who retroactively cheers his efforts.

By the time he’s reached the liberation of the fawn, Martino is standing at the end of a promontory, with the fence to his right and free fall to his left. He sits down at the edge, letting his legs dangle as he takes in the new perspective over Jonesy Lake that his position affords him.

“Thumper’s going to be so relieved,” Nico comments as Martino concludes his story and heaves in a deep breath to recover from both the adventure and its retelling.

“Who?”

“Thumper?” Nico repeats. “From _Bambi._ ”

“I’ve never actually seen it.”

“You haven’t? What were you doing when you were a kid?”

“My mom thought it was too sad, she never let me watch it.”

“Marti,” Nico replies and he sounds almost scolding. “You have to see _Bambi_.”

“I have seen Bambi. He hangs out in the forest by my lookout. I just saved his fawn.”

Nico, seemingly too outraged by the lapse in his animated movie knowledge, ignores the jab and continues.

“Your dad’s girlfriend’s kid, doesn’t he know _Bambi?_ ”

“He’s 9, I’m pretty sure he’s past it. And weirdly enough, the fawn with the dead mom didn’t come up when I met him.”

Taking his mind away from the afternoon, Martino thinks back to the curious kid who had seemed so intrigued by his presence at the dinner table and had taken it upon himself to fill the awkward silences with a million questions he had had no idea how to answer. 

He had spent so long preparing himself to hate everything about that evening that when it had only turned out mildly strained and Aurelio had insisted on showing him a weird video game about training dragons, Martino had been left unbalanced. So, when his dad had tried repeatedly to set up another dinner, he had done what he had been doing best lately and ignored the offers. Now he wonders what could possibly be so bad about hanging out again with a kid who hasn’t done anything to him.

“Next time, you can both watch it.” Nico had heard the story and its unsatisfying conclusion a few days ago, when staying in and watching the fire had started to get to Martino’s mood and he had ended up ranting about his father. His tone is purposefully light when he makes the suggestion, so there’s no way he doesn’t have an ulterior motive.

“Why would I do that? He’s either going to be traumatized or think I’m lame.”

“Nine-year-olds are easy, he won’t think you’re lame for a few years at least.”

“Thanks, I feel better,” Martino retorts.

“I’m sure if you gave him a real chance, he’d think you’re great. Who wouldn’t?”

Martino kicks his heels against the rock, looking down at the lake below.

“That’s easy to say, but he’s actually met me.”

“Lucky kid,” Nico replies earnestly, ignoring Martino’s attempt at levity.

It’s not a new thing for Nico to occasionally interject with complimentary, sometimes bordering on wistful, comments. Time seems to move differently here, so Martino’s lost track of when he started exactly, but it’s been weeks at least. For the past week, however, ever since a hot night where they had looked at the stars until Martino fell asleep clutching the radio, they’ve been hitting more and more deeply. That night, as the sky grew darker, the words traded through the radio had gotten more hushed at first, but then more daring as well, dancing across the line until neither of them was entirely sure where it used to sit.

Since then, they’ve been going about their days almost as if nothing had happened, as if it was just one more thing on the pile of things they don’t discuss. Martino can’t decide whether or not he wants them to. So, whenever Nico says something like that, they usually sit with it in silence for a beat until one of them brings up something else and they move past it. There’s ten days left of their contracts, ten days before they each go their separate way and Martino has to start piecing his life back together. 

The fire is not going away, and neither are Martino’s feelings, but just like the fire, he’s not sure if there’s anything he can do about them but watch and keep talking to Nico. What he can do, however, is rescue a fawn and let a kid who never asked for a new stepdad teach him the best way to duel animated dragons. The rest is out of his hands.

“Fine, next time I saw him, I'll ask him if he’s ever seen _Bambi_ ,” Martino replies, moving them past it.

“You should. And then you can tell that kid you met him when you went on your trip.”

Martino huffs a brief laugh. “Sure. And that meeting him was the highlight of my summer.”

The words come out too honest for what was supposed to be moving them past it, but he can’t bring himself to regret them.

He watches a crested caracara circle around and around a clearing below him, preparing to strike.

“Yeah, mine too,” Nico replies.


	14. Day 79: Departure

“Everybody? Just like that?” Martino contemplates all he still has to fit into his seemingly full backpack in dismay. More forcefully than necessary, he tries to shove a can down the bundle of clothes that is already stuffed in there.

“I know, but it’s kind of an emergency.”

Martino understands that argument, he does, but that doesn’t mean that when Nico had radioed him to relay the fact that all lookouts were being evacuated, he wasn’t caught off guard. Maybe he should have expected it. After all he had followed the updates on the fire and he had figured that they weren’t particularly good, but he hadn’t thought they were that bad either. Not leave-everything-behind-and-leave-eight-days-early bad.

“But I thought the fire was still pretty far,” Martino insists, finding another tee-shirt behind him and shoving it into the pack as well.

“For now, but they still can’t control it and the wind’s turning. Based on their predictions, it could be headed straight west.”

“And we have to go right now?”

Martino doesn’t intend to be difficult, it’s just a lot to process. He thought he still had eight days to be fully ready to return to the normal world. Now, he’s going to have to be on his way back to Italy early and he doesn’t want to think about it yet, especially not while he has to run from a wildfire.

“You can stay, but good luck making your way out of the forest on your own,” Nico replies, ever-patient for his irritated tone.

“But it’s going to take five hours to get to your lookout, how is that not just as dangerous?”

“It’s still fine today, but it might not be tomorrow. I know it sucks, but they don’t usually evacuate people for no good reason.”

“Has it happened to you before?” The question is an attempt at distracting himself while he takes a lap around the tower to see if he hasn’t forgotten anything. He’s not sure what would happen if he did. Whatever he forgets might burn or it might fall to the next person to stay in this tower. And that next person won’t be him, he’s pretty sure of it. He doesn’t think he could get away with the whole scheme twice.

“Once, my second year, around the end of July. I stayed to help out the firefighters during August, and trust me, Marti, you don’t want to be in the area if it gets really bad.”

Martino’s stomach drops but he’s pretty sure Nico’s right. The problem is that neither leaving nor staying sound like appealing options. Keeping away from the fire is probably the only thing tipping the balance in favor of leaving.

“I think I’m ready,” he declares, standing up and wiping his clammy hands on his jeans.

“Good, I have to go for a little bit to talk to the others, but you just have to go straight north. I’ll keep you company on the way. And I’ll be up here waiting for you.”

There’s actually another factor tipping the balance, although it had been temporarily overshadowed by the whole sudden evacuation thing, which is that the helicopter is picking everybody up at Nico’s lookout. The thought gives Martino renewed energy and he pushes hard on top of the pack to close it before hoisting it on his back.

“I’ll hold you to that,” he replies with a smile before stepping out the door, the heavy weight of the pack only resting on his right shoulder almost making him topple. He grabs the handle to close the door behind him and pauses for a second, scanning the small room and taking in the sparse, uncomfortable furniture.

There will be time to get sentimental later, now he has a five-hour hike ahead of him, and the fire may still be a way away, but the faint smell of ash in the air and the heat both make him want to get started without delay. He closes the door and steps down the stairs. At the bottom, he turns left on the trail that heads north and starts hiking.

He’s about one hour into the hike, not letting himself focus on anything but the path underneath his feet, the weight over his shoulders, the wind blowing overhead in the spruces and the fact that each step takes him closer to safety and to Nico, when his radio crackles.

“How’s it going, Marti?”

“Okay so far. I’ve just passed Thunder Canyon, I’m heading toward Beartooth Point now.”

“That’s good.”

“What about the others?”

“Everyone’s on their way now. You’ll get to see some of them.”

“That’s more people than I’ve seen in months.”

There’s a brief laugh across the radio. “I know, you still have about four hours to prepare yourself for it.”

“I’ll try my best,” Martino breathes out as he starts climbing the long slope that will lead him up to Beartooth Point.

“Marti, I’m sorry, I have to talk to rescue now. I’ll be back in a little while, okay?”

“You’re a busy man today.”

“I’d rather talk to you.”

His tone is so sincere, Martino feels warmth settle in his chest, incomparable to the sweltering heat surrounding him.

“But you’ve got to save all those people instead, it’s hard to be a hero.”

“Shut up and walk. I’ll talk to you later.”

There is absolutely no way Martino could have prepared for Nico’s next words, over an hour later, and they make him stop almost despite himself and grab the trunk of a nearby fir to steady himself.

“Marti, I have to evacuate.”

He’s about halfway through his hike and incapable of resuming walking for the time being, so he decides that he’s due a break, to catch his breath, drink something and digest what he’s just heard.

“What do you mean?” He’s stalling, he’s got a pretty good idea of what Nico might mean, but as he pulls out his water bottle, he suddenly doesn’t want to hear it.

“I’m leaving now.”

“But I’m on my way.”

“I know.” Even through the radio, the sigh is clearly audible and he knows Nico’s probably not happy about it either. The way up to Thorofare suddenly seems impossible to close. “They’ll have to pick up two other lookouts with you and we won’t all fit in the helicopter, so I’m going now.”

Martino doesn’t say that he promised to wait because Nico already sounds utterly dejected and things are bad enough, but it weighs in the silence between them.

“I’m sorry, Marti, I tried to find another way.”

Martino wonders if that’s where he’s been this past hour, trying to move heaven and earth and the whole rescue team so he could keep his promise.

“Like you said, it’s an emergency,” Martino replies.

Just like that, neither of them has any idea what to say. Martino makes himself start walking again or he might just end up slumping against the tree and he’s not sure he’d be able to get up again.

“You’re not going to come back next year, are you?”

“I don’t know, Ni. But probably not. I don’t even know what I’m going to be doing next month.”

An unfamiliar voice shouts in the background and Nico replies something in English that Martino doesn’t try to catch. As long as he can ignore the reality of the situation, he can keep pretending Nico will always be at the other end of the radio and that he’ll be waiting for him at the end of the trail.

“They’re about to take off, so… Good luck with everything, Marti. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“Good luck with your thesis.”

It’s so final that for a split second, Martino feels almost panicked. He clutches the radio and presses the button harder than he needs.

“Wait, Nico. What about… What about Bambi?”

Nico huffs a brief laugh. “He’ll be fine, Marti. He’s probably far away already.”

“Are you sure?”

“Animals don’t tend to stick around when things start to burn.”

“Neither do we.”

“No. I have to go. Bye, Marti.”

The radio stops crackling and Martino’s not even sure Nico’s going to hear him when he replies.

“Bye, Nico.”

Once Thorofare lookout is in sight, Martino ignores the pain in his legs and keeps going until he’s up the stairs and inside the tower. The cabin is empty and desolate. It looks a lot like his except that the desk is on another wall and it’s slightly bigger, covered in manuals and several orange binders. There are fire safety posters up on the walls and one identifying different species of trees. In the middle of the room, left on the firefinder is a sheet of paper that Martino picks up.

It’s him, or more precisely, it’s what Nico could assume he looked like based on the very thin information he was given. It’s drawn exclusively in pencil so the whole drawing is in shades of gray except for a smattering of orangey dust across his hair. Underneath the drawing, in big block letters is written “Bambi”, underlined once in a single, purposeful stroke of pencil.

Martino picks up the drawing and rolls it tight. He leaves the cabin without a backward glance to take a seat on a rock at the bottom of the tower.

The other two lookouts show up one by one not long after, both looking just as dusty, hot and tired as he does. They don’t get very much beyond introductions and shallow small talk before they fall silent, each lost to their own thoughts. Martino keeps rolling the sheet of paper between his fingers and staring unseeingly at the entrance of the trail.

It’s a tight fit within the helicopter, and the air is suffocating with five people inside. The ride passes in a blur and Martino sees nothing of the landscape that they’re leaving behind.

It’s not helpful or productive, but he can’t stop thinking that this was not how the summer was supposed to end, not after fleeing Rome and making everybody worry, and not after finally managing to find something like freedom again.

This was not how it should have ended with Nico either. He doesn’t know what he was expecting to happen there, but something at least, not hurried goodbyes through a radio and then being left alone with a drawing as his only souvenir.

Instead of enjoying his last week in the forest, he has new plans to make that he doesn’t know how to tackle. He’ll have to talk about the fire and the evacuation and his mother will worry retroactively. He’s going to have to explain to his father why his English hasn’t improved even though it had been his main argument to convince him to pay for the trip. He’ll have to face Eva and apologize for betraying her again.

The helicopter drops them off on the parking lot where a ranger had left him back in early June, next to the entrance of the trail he had then started on, harried and jetlagged. The helicopter is off again to patrol the area and after brief good wishes, the two lookouts head to their cars, probably eager to be home, to find a shower, food, rest, whatever is waiting for them out there.

Behind the two vehicles driving off, an old battered car remains. Its doors are wide open and there’s a figure leaning against the trunk that looks overwhelmingly familiar, like a silhouette glimpsed across a pond. Martino’s never been so sure of himself in his life when his steps turn to strides and Nico pushes himself up, grinning when he catches his eye. Just as Martino is about to reach him, Nico opens his arms wide and he doesn’t think twice before he lets himself sink into it.

“What the fuck are you doing here? You said you evacuated!”

“I did, I evacuated my lookout,” Nico replies, wrapping his arms around his back. The grin is as obvious in his voice now as it was through a radio.

“You dick, I thought you were gone.”

“I said I’d wait for you.”

Martino doesn’t really have words to answer that, so he buries his face into Nico’s shoulder and holds him tighter.

“I’m glad you didn’t burn down,” Martino simply mumbles and as glad as he is to finally be able to see Nico in the flesh, he appreciates not having to look at his face when he says it.

“You too.”

With some effort, he manages to step back and finally takes the chance to have a good look at Nico, at the smattering of dust in his dark hair, the twinkle in his green eyes, the way he carries himself like he is filled with more energy than his body can contain.

“I guess you really aren’t that tall,” Nico comments after giving him a similar once-over

“I told you.”

Nico finally notices the rolled-up sheet of paper in Martino’s hand and his face lights up even more, like he has a bottomless reserve of joy to express.

“You found it. I was hoping you would.”

Martino raises his hand to unfold the drawing.

“Oh, so you didn’t just leave it behind to burn?”

“No, I had a feeling you might take a look around.” They both look down at the drawing as if they had yet to memorize every line of it.

“Really?” Martino’s tone is surprised. “What made you think that?”

“Because it’s what I would have done.” Despite the way he shrugs, Nico’s tone comes off as almost insecure, as if he wasn’t sure they were on the same page. As if, after almost three months, he could still doubt that Martino felt it too. They look at each other for a beat and whatever he reads in Martino’s eyes must comfort him because the smile is back on his face. Wind makes the sheet of paper in Martino’s hand flutter, drawing his attention back to the drawing.

“That’s not what I look like at all.”

Nico laughs and takes it to examine it closer, glancing down between the art and the model. “I did my best with what you gave me.”

“And I’m Bambi now?” Martino points towards the bottom of the drawing where he knows the name is written in upper case letters.

“I don’t know, you were pretty intent on not letting me call him that.”

“I just think you could have been more original about it.”

While he’s speaking, he notices Nico’s eyes move to a point behind him before his expression freezes. He’s about to turn around to see what could have caused this reaction when Nico grabs his arm, effectively stopping him.

“If you turn around, do it really slowly.”

He’s dropped his voice almost to a whisper and the whole charade is starting to make Martino nervous. Surely the fire couldn’t have reached them yet. “Why?”

“Trust me, do it real slow.”

Martino follows the instructions, almost regretting it when Nico lets go of his arm. In front of him, a few meters from the trail leading into the park, there’s a stag standing just at the edge of the parking lot. He’s looking at them, unmoving.

“That can’t be him, right?” Martino’s whispering as well now. The deer does look a lot like his neighbor, but it seems so improbable that he could be here, now, as if he knew Martino wasn’t coming back and wanted to say goodbye.

“Why not?” Nico asks, taking a slow step ahead to come stand next to Martino.

“We’re so far from my lookout.”

“But have you seen him since you pulled the fawn out of the fence?” Martino shakes his head negatively. “That’s not such a great distance to cover for deer. And it’s safe here for now, the fire’s still pretty far away.”

Leaves rustle next to the stag and when the fawn comes out hesitantly to stand next to him, any trace of doubt vanishes from Martino’s mind. Neither of them seems to have suffered consequences from their last encounter, to Martino’s relief.

“I thought the fawn must be his kid, but that stag can’t be his dad,” Nico states suddenly.

“Why not?”

“That stag’s too young. He’s still a juvenile.”

“Oh. Then why is he hanging out with a fawn?”

The question seems to stump Nico who looks deep in thought for a moment before a smile tugs at his lips.

“Maybe they’re… stepbrothers.”

Martino gives him a disbelieving look and a nudge before turning back to the two deer, whoever they are to each other. All four of them stare for a while longer until the stag raises his head up in the air and huffs an abrupt breath of air once before both animals turn around and disappear back into the forest. Martino and Nico stand in the empty parking lot, looking on after them, now seemingly all alone in the world.

It takes a while for the spell to break. Nico is the first one to move, stepping a little further away so he can face Martino again.

“Where are you headed now?”

The question brings back the uncertainty, but it doesn’t seem so daunting any more, not with Nico at his side.

“I have no idea.” He tries to summon every possibility that had crossed his mind during the helicopter ride and that he had let slip away because he didn’t want to think about any of it. “I still had a week left and I’m not sure I could afford to change my plane ticket to leave early.”

“You don’t have to leave early.”

“But I don’t have anywhere to stay until my flight leaves. I could probably go to the nearest city and find a cheap hostel or something, but…” The idea of spending his last week locked in a small room in a random city he doesn’t know makes his stomach twist. But then again, so does having to fork out the price of a new plane ticket.

“You can stay with me,” Nico offers simply, evidently, and it makes Martino’s heart skip a beat. It seems so perfect and yet so impossible that he can’t believe the words have actually been uttered.

“What?”

“I’m going to head back to my place, you could come with me. You don’t have to leave early.”

As he waits for an answer, Nico’s gaze doesn’t waver and Martino can’t look away. It may not have been a dream after all.

“Are you sure?”

“My roommates won’t be here yet so it’s not a problem. You’ll just have to be stuck in a car with me for 10 hours.”

His teasing tone and the spark in his eyes show that he doesn’t really believe Martino will mind. With some effort, Martino bites back the first thing on his tongue, which is that he has just spent three months with Nico in his ear and he had hated the thought of losing this. Instead, he focuses on the more practical aspect of the proposal.

“Ten hours? Where do you live, Canada?”

“No, Moscow.”

Martino blinks at him uncomprehendingly.

“You want to drive to Russia?”

The sound of laughter he’s become so used to hearing through the crackling of the radio rings in the empty lot.

“No, Marti, to Idaho. That’s where I go to college.”

“Right.” He tries to hide his embarrassment by not dwelling on his ignorance of American geography. “I don’t mind if you don’t mind that I sleep the whole way through.”

“You’re not even going to keep me company?” Nico exclaims, raising his eyebrows in an outraged expression.

“I just hiked for 5 hours in a forest fire. And it’s _10 hours_ , Ni.”

The sigh Nico heaves is just as feigned as his outrage. “Fine, I guess the radio will have to be enough.”

“It has been so far,” Martino comments with a smile that Nico mirrors, with no pretense behind it this time.

“We’d better get going. It’s a long drive, who knows what could happen on the way?” Now, Martino may be imagining it - after all, he’s still not convinced any of this is really happening - but something in Nico’s voice sounds like a promise.

Nico turns around to open the trunk of the car where Martino is only too happy to shove his backpack so he won't have to look at it for the next 10 hours.

They each take their seats carefully as, despite the sunshield and the doors that must have been open since the helicopter dropped Nico off, the car is stiflingly hot. The warm air that washes through the car still helps chase away the stale smell while Martino takes a look around. Despite having been left on a parking lot for the past 3 months and being clearly past its prime, the car feels lived-in and comfortable and he gratefully sinks into the seat, huffing out a long breath of air.

Having fiddled with settings Martino didn’t pay attention to, Nico turns the key into the ignition and air rushes through the vents as the engine shudders into life.

Nico rests his arm on the wheel as he turns to Martino with a grin.

“Ready to go?”

“Ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> There will be a short coda that should be posted in a week or two at most. It will feature some driving, a detour, a starry sky and more.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like visuals, this is [Martino's tower](https://highmoongaming.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/26262626.png?w=816) and here's a [map of the area](https://www.camposanto.com/external/blog/160226_jake/Firewatch-World-Map-Textured.jpg). Marti is in Two Forks and Nico in Thorofare lookout way up in the north.


End file.
